On Wednesday, November 16, 2022, former Destin City Council-member Parker Destin officially announced his candidacy for the Okaloosa County School Board race in 2024.

The election will happen during in 2024 August Primary, with Destin having already pre-filed to become a candidate.

“The race is a long way off in the minds of most voters, but I believe it’s vital to get started working in order to show parents, teachers and voters that I’m engaged and serious about the position,” said Destin to Get The Coast on Wednesday.

Destin says this early announcement will give him plenty of time in the coming months to begin discussing the challenges facing the Okaloosa County School District.

“I’ll be talking about everything from how we address the root causes of the exodus of folks exiting the teaching profession to how we must actually fund the building of new facilities to deal with the student overcrowding that’s the result of the explosive amounts of new residential growth that’s been approved in the past decades by our local governments,” said Destin.

While his announcement via social media was brief, he says he wants the voters of Okaloosa to understand, immediately, that he’s “running to protect the students and School District from the repugnant vitriol that has infected the discourse of our local school politics the last two cycles.” 

• “I’m like most voters, who find the nastiness of current politics at the national/state level distasteful, regrettable, and uncivil, but to have that ghoulishness become frequent and normalized in how we find the common grounds to educate our children is unacceptable,” he said. “I’m running because I know we need strong candidates capable of taking the arrows from malign actors so we can move past the noise and nonsense to get to the vital work of doing what is right for all of our kids.” 

Referring to the election campaigns we saw in the most recent School Board races, Destin had this to say:

“I can’t control how other people behave, but if anyone has the bad idea that they want to drag that slop into these 2024 school races, then I invite them to just hop into my race because they’re not going to prod me into anything undignified and they’re going to lose,” he said. “The electorate has already told us they’re tired of the ugliness, twice.”