Alamance-Burlington school board member Dan Ingle has withdrawn from this year’s race for one of three open school board seats that will be on the ballot for the November general election.
Alamance County board of elections director Dawn Hurdle confirmed Tuesday for The Alamance News that Ingle had filed paperwork on Friday to withdraw his candidacy for the school board race.
The school board race doesn’t have a primary; instead, three seats will appear on the November general election ballot.
“It’s time,” Ingle, 73, told The Alamance News in a brief phone interview Tuesday afternoon, adding that, had he been reelected to the school board, he’d be 79 by the time his second, four-year term would end.
Ingle pointed to a famous line from a Clint Eastwood movie, Magnum Force – “A man’s gotta know his limitations” – in explaining why he’s decided to bow out of public service when his term on the school board ends in December.
A retired former police chief for the town of Elon whose law enforcement career spanned 40 years, Ingle was later appointed by the county’s GOP to replace Republican Cary Allred in the state house in 2009 before winning a two-year term in the house in 2010. He also served on Alamance County’s board of commissioners from 2004 until 2009 and from 2014 until his resignation on April 1, 2016.
In the 2022 general election, Ingle led the balloting among six candidates for three open seats on the school board with 33,897 votes (24.99 percent), topping the second-highest vote-getter, Dr. Charles Parker, who received 27,2632 votes (20.10 percent), followed by Chuck Marsh with 25,839 votes (19.05 percent).
Marsh has since resigned (in February 2025), and his replacement, Dr. Eric Hall, filed last month hoping to secure a full, four-year term on the school board. Parker filed last month for reelection to a second term. The terms for Ingle, Hall, and Parker run until December 7, 2026.
Ingle said in an earlier interview that he’d flip-flopped for more than a year on whether to seek reelection to a second term on the school board. He ultimately filed for a second term on December 12, a week before the filing period for the race closed on December 19. At one point, he told an Alamance News reporter that he was leaning toward finishing his current term and then getting certified to teach in an ABSS school.
Ingle, Parker, and Marsh had been registered at Republicans when they were elected to the nonpartisan school board in 2022. Parker remains registered Republican; Ingle and Marsh switched their voter registrations to unaffiliated in the fall of 2023.
Marsh pointed at the time to contentious discussions with the-then all-Republican board of commissioners over the $29 million mold outbreak that shuttered ABSS schools for two weeks in September 2023 as part of his reason for changing his voter registration to unaffiliated. He also alluded later that fall to having been pressured by Alamance County’s GOP to appoint a Republican to finish out the remaining term of four-term incumbent Patsy Simpson, a Democrat who resigned from the school board in April 2023.
Instead, Marsh was among board members who voted 5-1 in November 2023 to appoint Seneca Rogers, a Democrat who’d previously run unsuccessfully for a seat on the school board, to finish Simpson’s term. [Then-school board member Ryan Bowden, a Republican, cast the lone vote against appointing Rogers. Then-school board member Donna Westbrooks also shed her Democratic party affiliation and registered as unaffiliated in the fall of 2023 but was not reelected to a second term in 2024.]
Ingle had also alluded to a breakdown in communications with fellow Republicans – over the mold crisis and Rogers’ appointment – when he made the motion to appoint Rogers at a school board meeting in November 2023. “I’m joining what’s becoming the majority party because I’m so disgruntled, particularly on the national level, with the infighting,” Ingle told The Alamance News at the time.
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More recently, however, Ingle attended a meeting of the Alamance County Republican Women’s Club, where he revealed that he’d recently changed his voter registration back to Republican. He told the newspaper last week that he’d hoped to clear his conscience about past disagreements with the party and atone for his actions in 2023.
In an interview before the school board’s latest semi-monthly meeting, Ingle said that, during his remarks to the Republican Women’s Club, he’d quoted a Bible verse, Proverbs 16:18, which warns, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
He’d wrestled with his conscience and ultimately realized he’d reacted out of anger – letting his pride get the better of him – when he left the Republican Party in 2023, Ingle said last week. “After doing this for 50 years – most, in some type of supervisory capacity, and people called me and blessed me out for making a decision – that got all over me. I got mad, and I apologized for that is what I did…Sometimes, we do things, and not only does it hurt our friends and acquaintances, but it hurts you spiritually.”
Despite his 2023 exodus from the GOP, Ingle said his political philosophy has never wavered: he’d always supported Republican principles of traditional social values, limited government, fiscal restraint, and personal responsibility, among others. Ingle insisted he hadn’t gone to the Republican Women’s Club meeting earlier this month in hopes of securing the party’s endorsement for the upcoming school board race.
In fact, he pointed out that school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves, a Republican, hadn’t gotten the party’s endorsement when she ran for a second term in November 2024 but was nonetheless the leading vote-getter, with 38,125 votes (15.36 percent) among eight candidates for four open seats that year.
The other candidates (and voter registrations) whose names will appear on the ballot for the November 3, 2026 are: Samira Khan of Burlington (Democrat); Hall, of Elon (unaffiliated); Katharine Frazier of Burlington (Republican); Stephanie Long Enoch of Green Level (Democrat); Kyle Ward of Graham (unaffiliated); and Brandy Whittaker of Burlington (Democrat).
