I Voted for Trump in 2020. Then I Stopped Voting. On August 18, I Am Voting Again.
I am a registered Republican who has not voted since 2020. Before that I researched local races minimally and tended to vote Republican because it was easiest. When Ali asked me for help I told her no. I was a single mom with no bandwidth, I hated public schools, and I was already doing the voucher math on my own time. Then I started doing the interviews. Here is what changed, and what I am asking you to do with fourteen days left.
By Amber Cebull · August 4, 2026
I have not voted since 2020. Before that, I researched minimally for local county races and tended to vote Republican, because it was easiest and it aligned with my idea at the time, that conservatives held conservative financial views.
I am a registered Republican and I voted for Trump in 2020. Right? Don't cancel me. Then I stopped voting altogether, because I watched things get worse and worse and I decided there was nothing I could do about any of it.
What I told Ali when she asked
When Ali first approached me, I told her I did not have the bandwidth to help. I am a single mom. I am too busy. I hated public schools, and I could not homeschool.
I had watched a lot of content online about the voucher programs and I was seriously considering them. I was doing the math on my own time, on the programs actually available to me. At one point I was talking to their dad about whether I might be able to homeschool them.
What kept my kids in was the arts. Chorus. The robotics program. Their friends and their teachers. The behavior specialist who was so willing to work with my kid one on one on his behavior issues, which came out of being bored in class and finishing his work too early. Not the district. And not the lunch, which two kids who do not really eat dairy or processed food hated.
Then I started doing the interviews
My brain makes connections and identifies patterns that other people miss. It is fast, and it synthesizes information quicker than most. That is not a brag, it is the only reason any of this happened, because once I started doing the interviews I started to see what was actually going on. Everything on this site came out of that.
So I am going to vote. And I am going to put every piece of information I have in front of you, so that you can walk into the polls with your own opinion instead of mine.
Trickle down politics is a real thing
I know it seems hopeless. I know it feels like we cannot do anything. But trickle down politics is a real thing. If we can cut them off at the local level, we can show more people that it works. And when enough local politics get cut off, we can gradually influence state politics. And then national.
Maybe it will be slow. Maybe we cannot do it. But if we do not try, we do our children a disservice.
We put out children who are receiving an inferior education. Children who are less well studied, who are not reading full textbooks, who are less well read, less eloquent, and less willing, or less confident that they are able, to challenge the status quo.
Maybe the board does not care about the legacy it leaves behind. We should. And we should not be teaching our kids that we sat by, disempowered, believing we could do nothing. That is not a precedent I am willing to leave for my kids.
You already did this. Not us.
We have already influenced so many things, and it is two women behind a page plus your interactions and your shares. This entire operation is a victory fueled by your feedback, and that is worth noting.
We have heard from so many of you who cannot comment and cannot like, but who keep coming back anyway, and who tell us you feel far less alone as teachers because of it. That is the whole reason this is still running.
What I am asking you for
I committed to dropping this project after August 18th if we can. But in order for me to get that time back, we need YOU to show up to the polls. We need you to care. We need you to VOTE.
Right now we are still not endorsing candidates. I would be lying if I did not tell you I am at the point where I really want that to change.
Our reach in the last 30 days has hit eyes nearly 200,000 times. That is an impression. I hope you take it seriously. That you vote. That you realize they are not listening. Not to the children, not to the teachers, and not to you.
Until you voice that in a VOTE and we make change, we will never have leaders who listen. We will only keep living in this same world with the same people, leveraging YOUR money in ways that are misaligned with our biggest priorities, and calling it government.
One thing to know before you go
If you have been sitting it out because of the party on your registration card, that is not a reason here. School board races in Florida are nonpartisan. Every registered Lee County voter gets a school board race on the August 18 ballot no matter what party you are, or if you have no party at all. I have a R next to my name and I get to vote in these. So do you.
Start here: The 2026 Money Map: every race on your ballot, and who is funding it
And if you are still not sure it matters: Why should you care about a school board race?
SHOW UP. Our community needs you to vote. 14 days until the primaries. Do your research.
Fact check
The checkable factual claims hold up. Two figures are the author's own and are labeled as such: her voting history, and the reach number, which comes from platform analytics this site has not independently audited.
This is an opinion piece and it argues a side. Most of it is one person's account of her own life and her own reasoning, which is not the kind of thing a fact-check can confirm or deny. What we can check is the small number of outside claims she makes, and we did. The personal passages are printed as she wrote them.
Checked The author's own account of her registration, her 2020 vote, and her voting history since; the Florida Constitution and the November 2024 Amendment 1 result; the Lee County Supervisor of Elections calendar for the August 18, 2026 primary; and this site's own published pages.
Florida school board races are nonpartisan, so party registration does not limit who can vote in them.
Florida school board elections are nonpartisan under the state constitution; voters made them so in 1998. Amendment 1 on the November 2024 ballot would have made them partisan starting in 2026. It drew about 55 percent yes, short of the 60 percent Florida requires, and failed. So every registered Lee County voter gets a school board race on the August 18, 2026 primary ballot regardless of party or of no party affiliation.
There are 14 days until the primary.
This piece was published August 4, 2026. The Florida primary is August 18, 2026, which is 14 days out. Lee elects seven board members, five from single-member districts voted on only by residents of that district plus two at-large. Four seats are on this ballot: Districts 1, 4 and 5 appear only for residents of those districts, and District 6 is at-large, which puts it on every Lee County ballot. Vote-by-mail and early voting dates differ from election day and are set by the Supervisor of Elections.
The author is a registered Republican who voted for Trump in 2020 and has not voted since.
This is her own account. In Florida, whether a person voted in a given election is public record and party registration is public record; how anyone voted is not, and never is. This site did not pull her voter file to check her, and readers should understand the 2020 vote itself is unverifiable by anyone.
The page reached nearly 200,000 impressions in the last 30 days.
The author reports roughly 190,000 for the trailing 30 days from the platform's own analytics as of publication, which the piece rounds to nearly 200,000. It counts impressions, meaning times content was displayed, not unique people, and one person can account for many. It has not been independently audited and this site is the interested party reporting it.
Children today are receiving an inferior education, read fewer full textbooks, and are less willing to challenge the status quo.
Stated plainly because it is the strongest claim in the piece and it is opinion, not measurement. It is the author's judgment about what she has seen, and this site is not attaching a statistic to it that it cannot carry. Readers who want data on Lee County specifically should look at the district's own published outcome and staffing figures rather than take this line as a finding.
Parents for Transparency is endorsing candidates.
Stated here because the piece openly says the author wants that to change, and a reader could misread it as an announcement. As of publication this site endorses no one. Our endorsement page records endorsements made by outside organizations for every candidate equally, including candidates with none, and a listing there is never our endorsement.
This site is run by two women.
Parents for Transparency is Amber Cebull and Ali Olivo. Neither is paid by a campaign, a party, a political committee, or a candidate for this work.
Fact-check sources
About the author
Amber Cebull Amber is a Fort Myers native. Her two kids, 13 and 12, go to Cypress Lake Middle School. She grew up in Lee County schools herself: Tanglewood Elementary, Allen Park Elementary, Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School's Gifted Program, Fort Myers High School's IB Program. She graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in English Literature and a minor in Psychology. An entrepreneur for 15 years, she has owned multiple businesses in the Fort Myers area, including a marketing and business strategy consulting practice and a brewery in Downtown Fort Myers.