School board races in Hillsborough County are nonpartisan.
But District 2 candidates Brittany Lyssy and Daniela Simic have weathered accusations and campaign scrutiny that have veered from the political to the personal, at times overshadowing their policies.
Advertisements, push polls and online commenters have attacked the candidates over everything from their backgrounds to their backers to their homes, even pulling their families into the fray.
In a district where state officials have increased political pressure in recent years, the race is among one of Tampa Bay’s most heated this cycle.
Brittany Lyssy, a lawyer and former president of Tampa Bay Young Republicans, faces Daniela Simic, a longtime educator who previously worked for Hillsborough County schools in a runoff election to take outgoing board member Stacy Hahn’s seat. Hahn is running for the County Commission.
Before the primary election in August, questions online surfaced over Lyssy’s residency.
Property records show a homestead exemption on a Longboat Key address where her husband, Doug Lyssy, is registered to vote in Manatee County. That property was damaged during Hurricane Helene. The couple and their two children at the time moved to a 684-square foot, one-bedroom condo off Ashley Drive in downtown Tampa that Lyssy’s husband has owned since 2016, and where Lyssy said she had lived part-time prior to 2024.
Property records indicate the couple purchased another 2-bedroom home in Longboat Key in 2025, but Lyssy said that was an investment property and maintained that the family lived at the Ashley Drive residence. She said her family has received attempts at people visiting late at night at the condo since speculation began.
Lyssy is registered to vote in Hillsborough County, and lists the Tampa property as her primary residence on campaign documents. The Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections office has said it does not verify residency information supplied by candidates.
“I have resided in District 2 and continue to reside in District 2,” Lyssy said again in an email this week.
Questions also surfaced around her involvement in a 2025 social media post in which the Young Republicans invited influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who had been arrested and were awaiting trial on rape and trafficking charges, to speak at any time. Lyssy said she was not president when the post was made and withdrew her membership from the group at that time.
Then came the attack advertisements on Simic.
One mailer, which also circulated on social media, said it was paid for by “concerned taxpayers of Hillsborough County” and not endorsed by any candidate. It claimed Simic had a “radical agenda,” and was “endorsed by radical extremists” with ties to the KKK.
Those claims were based on an endorsement from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been accused by the Department of Justice as providing funding to the KKK. Others have called those allegations baseless. The mailers also said Simic backed “boys in girls’ sports and bathrooms” and was “anti-parental rights.” Simic was also endorsed by Equality Florida Action, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ issues.
Another ad, which said schools in Duval and Hillsborough dipped in grades while Simic was an administrator there, was paid for by the political action committee Leading For Our Future. That group is chaired by William S. Jones, who chairs hundreds of right-leaning political action committees in Florida, according to the state’s division of elections website.
Then in mid-September, unidentified callers began phoning voters asking if claims they shared about Simic would make them more or less likely to vote for her. One claim: Simic had taken her “school-age child” to a drag performance.
Simic was was appalled by the claim, which she said like others made on the call was untrue.
Lyssy said in an email that neither she nor her campaign has commissioned or conducted phone polls.
For Simic, bringing her 10-year-old son into an attack crossed a line.
“I have had several different people tell me that I need to attack back,” Simic said. “But I’m not going to do that because if it takes going negative to win this campaign, then it’s not worth winning. What I am trying to teach my son is to be a good man, and what I’m asking the voters is to make me a leader of their children. That to me is more important than anything.”
Simic also pushed back on the claims about school grades, pointing to schools that also improved and Hillsborough’s rise in academic ranking while she worked for the district. She encouraged voters to read the articles the mailers referred to and look at school grades for themselves.
She said working in struggling schools has been her life’s work and passion since she graduated with an education degree in Philadelphia.
“When I went into districts, they were struggling. When I left, they were better,” she said. “Sometimes in education, you don’t see the results of your work immediately because we’re talking about children, we’re talking about human beings, and it takes a little bit of time for those things that you’ve implemented to see the positive effects of your work.”
Lyssy, too, has faced professional questions.
Posts this month circulated on social media of screenshots from the Florida Bar saying she was not in good standing.
Lyssy said the issue was an administrative filing matter that the Bar “promptly corrected.”
“I believe Hillsborough County families deserve a School Board election focused on the issues that directly impact our children and their education,” she wrote in an email. “I believe candidates should be evaluated on their qualifications, ideas and commitment to serving our students.”
Over the last 10 years, increasingly aggressive tactics like these have become more common in school board races, where messaging and attitudes toward candidates have begun to reflect a broader discourse, said Joshua Scacco, director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy and a professor of political communications at the University of South Florida.
“Part of what we are seeing in this particular race is a nationalization, basically, of local politics,” he said. “We’re seeing the seepage of national and statewide culture issues to the local level, and alongside that seepage comes the money with statewide groups.”
So far, Lyssy has raised more than $99,000 and Simic has raised more than $79,000. In District 6, where incumbent Karen Perez and former teacher and administrator Kenneth Gay face a runoff, the two candidates together have raised around $80,000.
Lyssy has campaigned on fiscal accountability to taxpayers and restoring trust in public schools, while Simic has focused on access to public education, teacher retention and addressing enrollment challenges.
Scacco said though the race remains nonpartisan, the candidates — and their donors — are priming voters in partisan ways with words like “parental rights” and “keep politics out of school”.
“It’s a continuation in a lot of ways of, and in some ways, what the governor started several years ago of intervening by endorsement in these school board races and things,” he said.
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