Smith defeats incumbent Lee to take Sumter school board 7 seat

Shery Smith is poised to be the new District 7 trustee on Sumter County’s school board.

According to unofficial election-night totals from Tuesday, Smith took 1,069 votes, or 52.63%, over incumbent Gloria Lee who took 46.28%, or 940 votes.

Smith is a native of Sumter who is a legal assistant specializing in immigration law. She also has experience in human resources, employee management and budgeting and can speak Spanish.

“I knocked on approximately 1,000 doors, and that is what the vote count looked like. Hard work paid off,” she said.

Smith wants to increase pay for staff members and improve student discipline and school safety for the district. She also wants to tackle fighting in schools, bullying and what she said is a  lack of consequences students receive.

“First and foremost, our children and employees deserve to be safe. We also need to look at the budget line by line and see if we are spending in the money in the right places,” she said.

Smith spent her Election Day working at Shuler – Killen LLC and then went to different precincts with friends to see how everything was going. She ended the night with her friends watching the votes roll in and said everyone screamed when they found out Smith took the District 7 seat.

Lee served two years of a four-year term that began in 2020, but her seat went up for election this year when districts were redrawn. She did not return calls from The Sumter Item Tuesday night for comment.

Votes will be made official on Friday, according to the Sumter County Voter Registration and Elections Office, once failsafe votes are considered, though those are not often more than a handful. Absentee and early votes are already included in Tuesday’s totals.