Incumbent Leventis faces 2 challengers for Sumter school board Area 8 seat

Clarification: In the print edition to this story on Page A11 in the Saturday, Oct. 17, edition, a large portion of incumbent Phil Leventis’ section of the article was inadvertently placed at the bottom of challenger Sherril Ray’s section. This is a corrected version.  

Editor's note: This is the second in a series on the five Sumter school board area seats that are up for election in November. Each week leading up to Election Day, The Sumter Item will analyze at least one area (alternatively called district) race and interview candidates on the ballot. All candidates will be contacted. Online this series, like other election information, will be free to read as a public service. Candidate Q&As in their own words were included in our Vote 2026 Guide section published in the Sept. 26-29 Weekend edition.

THE AREA 8 RACE

After last week covering Area 4 in the outlying Sumter County area, we go into the City of Sumter this week to look at the Area 8 race. Area 8, also referred to as District 8, includes the western and northern portions of the City of Sumter. Major roadways include Wilson Hall Road, Loring Mill Road, Patriot Parkway and others.

Three candidates filed and are in the race: incumbent Phil Leventis and challengers Philip Good and Sherril Ray. Leventis has served on the board for a little more than 1.5 years after winning a special election for the seat in February 2025. The seat had been vacated a few months earlier in November 2024 after the previous Area 8 trustee Jeff Zell ran for state Senate and won. Given that, Zell had to resign after serving two years on the board.

Area 8 was new to the school board in 2022 after board representation was changed from seven single-member districts to nine in Sumter County. Ray lost as an incumbent that year after serving a four-year term that began in 2018 for a broader board area that included a portion of the new area map.

PHILIP GOOD

Good served 30 years in the U.S. Army between active duty and the Reserve and moved to Sumter for a position at U.S. Army Central Command (Third Army) in 2011.

For his first six years locally until July 2017, he served in "dual status" to include the Army Reserve and also as a civilian, Good said. At that time, he retired from the Reserve and served as an Army civilian for eight more years until he officially retired in December of last year.

Good has taken up the teaching profession in recent years and will graduate by the end of this year with two master's degrees - one in teaching secondary social studies and the other in history. He is doing his student teaching at Sumter High School and that is an unpaid position, he added.

According to Good, he considered running for the Area 8 seat in fall 2022 but there were already too many people in race after four candidates had filed.

His platform, or talking points, now are academic excellence, safe and supportive schools, providing opportunities for every learner and developing responsible citizens for our nation.

Regarding student opportunities, those would include preparing them for college, the military, skilled trades or direct employment.

Additionally, responsible stewardship of the taxpayers' money is essential, given the school district has the largest budget in the county.

"They have to be responsible financial stewards of the resources that taxpayers have given them," Good said.

Community engagement is another key element because schools cannot serve every child's full needs. That includes parental involvement, grandparents also ideally, churches and the whole community, he added.

All those factors will help strengthen the local public schools and in turn the greater Sumter community and make Sumter School District more attractive for military families transitioning into Shaw Air Force Base. During his 15 years of service here, Good noted that everyone he knew and worked with at Shaw with kids either lived in Blythewood or Lexington and commuted daily into the base. Or for those families who lived in Sumter, the parents enrolled their children in a local private school or home school. He added he is sure some Shaw families do attend the local public schools but not those he associated with.

Good said he has not studied the district realignment (rezoning attendance lines) and board Master Plan issues but said something must be done regarding bus transportation and students arriving late to school based on his student teaching experience.

As a side note, new Superintendent Gerald Gary and his administration have said they plan to conduct a full-scale online enrollment process with parents in the spring to obtain proper residential address information for bus transportation purposes. No recent Sumter superintendent has pursued that measure previously. Good said he was unaware of that challenge with addresses.

Regarding incumbent Phil Leventis' tenure as a board member, Good said he was not aware of his voting record and how long in total he has served on the board.

If he wins in November, Good is aware that he cannot serve as a teacher in the local district and may consider an area private school if there is a teacher opening, initiating a constitutional law class to teach to local homeschoolers, or even retire. He said he is not necessarily interested in commuting to a public school district outside of Sumter.

PHIL LEVENTIS

Leventis, a former state senator for 32 years from 1980 to 2012, has served on the board for an abbreviated term since March 2025 after taking a special election for the Area 8 seat in late February 2025. Zell's win in the state Senate in November 2024 required him to vacate the seat.

Leventis is also retired from a career in the U.S. Air Force and the South Carolina Air National Guard and was also a small-business owner.

As far as his platform, he said based on his career experience that he "adds a good eye on the district financial matters" and various things that need to be focused on in that regard.

Considering the district's annual deficit for fiscal 2026 that just ended, Leventis said he thinks a lot of attention needs to be targeted on the budget now as is always necessary given its overall size.

Another asset he thinks he brings to the board is being willing to "call something out" when he thinks it's wrong.

"Based on my broad experience, I am willing to call something out if I see something that is wrong," Leventis said. "I am not going to go along just because it is presented to us as 'X' when I think it is 'Y.'

"That's important and I am, for example, not looking for a future in other areas of politics. I am just trying to do what is best for the district, and that is really tied to our financial ability to put on the type of program that we should be doing."

He added he has always thought "it's important to ask difficult questions."

In that regard, concerning the board's budget process in the spring for the current fiscal year he abstained during both readings because he said the entire process was "opaque" to him and lacked the necessary time and detailed focus.

Additionally, numerous times he has called out board Chairman Shawn Ragin for his apparent conflict of interest in serving as a trustee while he has also been approved by a state authorizer to open up a public charter school in Sumter.

He added since Ragin became chairman two years ago there have been two new state laws passed by the General Assembly. One prohibits a sitting school board member from submitting a proposal for a new proposed charter school. The second piece of legislation bans school districts from having minimum grade floors for students that Ragin tried to implement in 2025 six months after the previous school board removed the floor.

On Gary as the new superintendent, Leventis said he thinks he is for providing equitable opportunities for all district students. Also, he added Gary is well suited for the position in his opinion.

"He has incredible command of the district's operations based on his career experience," Leventis said.

He indicated that Gary's brother is also a district superintendent in the state and there are about 70 districts in South Carolina.

"Obviously, the family is just naturally talented and seems to work very hard," Leventis said.

He added that the board has been unable to unite because of its leadership to include Ragin and vice Chairman Brian Alston.

According to Leventis, he is for realignment - or rezoning district attendance lines - to benefit all district students but it must be based on a board Master Plan and the current facilities study that is underway.

He said that he considers serving as a school board member "is the best thing I know to do to better the community that has been so good to me and our family."

SHERRIL RAY

Ray was a career educator in Sumter's public schools for more than 40 years. For 30-plus years, she served in the former Sumter School District 2, which was under the leadership of Superintendent Frank Baker for 20-plus years.

Ray's last school-level role was when she was principal at Lakewood High School from 2004 to 2013. She then became the consolidated district's hearing officer 2013-17.

Ray served four years with Baker, the Rev. Daryl McGhaney and current trustees Brian Alston and Matthew "Mac" McLeod as a trustee from 2018 to 2022 and was part of the board majority when it tried to reopen Mayewood Middle School in 2019. After the move, then-state Superintendent Molly Spearman placed the district on Fiscal Emergency with the state Department of Education for violating its own financial recovery plan at the time.

She was also in the voting majority on the move to rezone all schools' attendance lines during COVID-19 that drew outcry from district parents, among other actions. The broad-scale realignment effort would have moved 32% of district high school students to a new school and 17% of all students.

A project theme in the study was to shuffle students from higher-enrollment schools in the City of Sumter, to include the current Area 8, to lower-enrollment schools in the outlying rural areas. Because of various reasons, the rezoning plan has not occurred.

Ray ran as an incumbent in 2022 when the new Area 8 was initially formed in a four-way race, but she did not advance to the runoff that former trustee and current state Sen. Jeff Zell won.

She said on Friday that a new study for realignment would be necessary now, given the data in the former study was from 2020, and that rezoning could take a different look now. According to Ray, the district and board also need to look now at a new facilities study (which is being undertaken), residential development since 2020 and potentially building new schools.

She said students in older, dilapidated schools in the city could move to the county's rural schools, which are in better physical condition currently. That is a theme being pushed by Rembert-area Sumter County Councilman Carlton Washington.

The outcry from parents four years ago with the first realignment plan is because people do not like change, Ray added.

She pointed out that in the former District 2 in the 1990s people were also upset with the district's plan then to build Crestwood High School and Lakewood because other school changes were necessary, but in the end the move has been positive.

Ray is also on Washington's magnet school committee to develop Rafting Creek Elementary into a magnet. The councilman developed and submitted his magnet initiative proposal, aligned with various industry clusters, to the school district and media outlets in the spring without consulting district administration at the time, the county economic development team or Rembert-area school board trustee Brittany English.

When The Item asked Ray concerning those points, she said she did not have a concern with Washington's proposal and serving on his committee.

The newspaper also pointed out that at various community meetings in the last month Washington has been critical of Gary as the new superintendent concerning his district-level hires, the bus transportation issues and the district's estimated $10 million deficit for the fiscal year that concluded on June 30. Gary did not start as the district's new leader until April 1.

The councilman has also endorsed Ray in Area 8, even though the area is not in his council district.

Concerning Washington's narrative on Gary, Ray said she is "not his adviser."

Regarding her service on the school board from 2018 to 2022, Ray said she never wanted to do anything to hurt the district and said her hope if she is elected now is that things "could be very different, depending on the makeup of the board" and more can be accomplished versus recent boards.

Her campaign platform, she said, is achievement, accountability with district finances and board action.

Bruce Mills covers education, business and industry and general assignments for Sumter, Clarendon and Lee counties. To support Bruce's work, please make a tax-deductible donation below.

">