Teresa Jacobs to depart Orange County politics after decades of service

Teresa Jacobs ordered a shot of espresso with Splenda at a coffee shop just south of Orange County Public Schools headquarters one blistering June afternoon.

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It’s an efficient drink that packs a punch and does its job with very little fanfare. Jacobs’ coffee order mirrors the leadership style that she — standing just over five feet tall — brought to the Orange County School Board, where she arrived eight years ago already a formidable political figure.

Jacobs, whose term is up in November, will soon step away from public office after a 24-year career serving as first a county commissioner, then county mayor and then chair of the school board. As mayor, she helped direct public money toward the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, a new Orlando Magic arena and Camping World Stadium and championed mental health services. She guided the county through the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre and the school district through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Once out of office, Jacobs, 69, still wants to find ways to help people.

“I’m gonna have to figure out something that I can do, no matter how small it might seem to somebody. I don’t know how you live without that. I have had 24 years of always being able to do something when I saw a problem, and that’s a real blessing,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs never thought she’d get into politics, joking that in high school she would have won the “Least Likely to Ever Run for Office” superlative, if it were a category in her senior yearbook.

When she moved to Central Florida with her husband, she first wanted to find a rental in Hunter’s Creek, but the two couldn’t find a place that would allow their golden retriever Maggie. So they ended up in MetroWest instead.

Because they landed in MetroWest, Jacobs was faced with a developer trying to run a road through her neighborhood. She fought against the developer with the Orange County Homeowners Association, which served as an introduction to politics and grassroots activism. A mother of four children who attended public schools, Jacobs also championed rules to curb new development if public schools were already crowded.

That work caught the attention of former U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, the mayor of Orange County at the time, who met with Jacobs over lunch to convince her to run for the county commission. Martinez said he saw a “deep integrity” and desire to do the right thing in Jacobs from the jump.

As a leader, Teresa was “someone who served unselfishly, who served with dedication, and who served with a desire to give back to a community,” Martinez said.

Kevin Shaughnessy, an Orlando attorney who served as a campaign and political advisor for Jacobs, said her ability to win six elections — even winning a four-person primary for school board chair with over 52% of the vote — is proof that the Jacobs model of leadership resonated with the community.

Leaders like Jacobs are “few and far between,” he said. She combined “hard work” and “principled diligence” and cares deeply about the people in her community.

“She would spend hours and days and weeks getting ready for public hearings and making final decisions on multi-million or billion-dollar projects. She just wants to get it right, and she wants the people to know that that’s her goal as their leader is to listen to them and get it right,” he said.

Jacobs said she has several highlights from her time in public office, including helping to build the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center and Inter&Co Stadium in downtown Orlando as county mayor, and rallying the Orlando community after the Pulse nightclub massacre that killed 49 people in 2016.

After facing term limits at the county, Jacobs pivoted to what she said was the “hardest and most important” job she ever had — leading the county school board.

During her time at the top of Orange County’s school board, she helped the district navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. At heated board meetings, with weapons confiscated from some visitors ahead of some, Jacobs repeatedly recessed the board when audience members turned loud and unruly or refused to wear face masks — as district policy then required. Those recesses, with the board leaving its meeting room, were the first in her long career in public office.

As the board chair, she helped manage battles with its teachers union over pay and benefits, culture war arguments over library books and declining enrollment.

She’s most proud of the positive working relationship between the board’s members, even if they disagreed on key issues. Jacobs said she intentionally seated Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member who has pushed for banning books she views as “pornographic”, and Maria Salamanca, the board’s first openly gay member, next to one another following their elections in 2022.

“I thought this was an opportunity to see if we can continue to foster this culture of respect and appreciation for each other despite our differences,” Jacobs said.

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Angie Gallo, who like Jacobs was first elected to the board in 2018 and is now running to replace her, said the departing chair “handles difficult situations with grace.”

“She’s a true leader. She’s compassionate, she cares about students, she cares about people, she cares about our community, and I think that shows in her leadership style. She’s done a great job of navigating very rough waters for the past eight years,” Gallo said.

Jacobs leaves office as the school district faces funding shortfalls, but she said the district is in good hands with the board and Superintendent Maria Vazquez at the helm.

The surge in the state-funded scholarships for private school and homeschooling services still stands as an existential threat to public schools, she said.

Last school year, OCPS lost about 5,600 students from those scholarships offered through the state voucher program, declining birth rates and immigrant students no longer enrolled. Next year, the district expects to lose about another 3,000 students — meaning $26 million less in per-pupil funding.

“My biggest fear is that the state will continue down this path of finding ways to make it easier, less expensive to go private school, make it harder and harder for public schools to fund themselves to operate. It’s just it’s a frightening proposition,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs said people always asked her why she never considered running for higher office, in Tallahassee or in Washington D.C., where she could enact statewide change.

But local government, she said, allowed her to push for change more directly, which is harder when you are one among hundreds of lawmakers.

Plus, even six elections later, Jacobs said she finds campaigning “extremely awkward.”

“That was not the way I was raised. Don’t walk around and toot your horn. You just don’t,” she said.

Despite this, Jacobs sees public education as an issue worth campaigning for and said if she were 20 years younger, she’d be “very, very tempted” to run for governor — believing the majority of Floridians are “craving” leadership that believes in funding public education.

If any gubernatorial candidate made funding public education the cornerstone of their campaign, they’d win, she said.

“There is nothing that government does that could be more important than education,” Jacobs said.

Despite having built schools, theaters and stadiums, Jacobs said she’s most proud of the “little things” she could do along the way for those in her community.

Once, Jacobs recalled seeing a man on the verge of tears at a local Target buying clothes for his kids. She approached him, and learned his house had burned down — and he’d lost his wife and all their possessions.

She helped connect him with crisis resources and people at the county to help aid his family.

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“It’s those little moments that will stick with me forever,” Jacobs said.