Chris Malone, one of a handful of candidates running on a platform of change, won the District 1 seat on the Wake County Board of Education. He will serve a four-year term representing northern and eastern Wake County.

Malone handily defeated Rita Rakestraw, a former teacher from Knightdale and Debbie Vair, a PTA leader from Rolesville.

Malone said voters were concerned about more than just the school system's diversity policy, which has worked to move students around in order to achieve racial diversity at first and later to make schools socio-economically diverse. But he said that policy was at the top of voters' minds.

"Rita was harmed by the past. She was a candidate who supported the diversity policy and it was a bad policy that caught up with her," Malone said.

Malone captured 58 percent of the 6,714 votes cast. Rakestraw won just 36 percent of the ballots. Vair claimed 395 votes, or 6 percent of the total.

Malone, a former town commissioner in Wake Forest, said stagnant thinking on the school board forced voters to look for an alternative.

"People who have run the schools in the past have had some good ideas. We kept on electing the same kind of people. The same people will only have so many good ideas," Malone said. "It worked for a while and it stopped working. It's like a business plan. You have to plan and six months later you adjust the plan if you need to."

In winning the seat, Malone will replace Lori Millberg who did not stand for re-election. That means the school board representative for eastern Wake County will live in another part of the county. But Malone says that won't be an issue when it comes time to advocate for the needs of students in eastern Wake County.

"What I want to do is take savings we can find in the system and put them into the schools that need the most help. I will be assertive to make sure they are split up among the schools that need the most help," Malone said.

Rakestraw said Malone will find that to be difficult. "He has said he will reallocate the resources, but I think he's going to find that there isn't any extra money," Rakestraw said.

But Rakestraw agreed with Malone that the current school system's leadership made it difficult to wage a winning campaign.

"A lot of parents were angry about the way the school board and the administration had been handling things like with the reassignments and year-round schools and the attitude they had. They were not flexible.," Rakestraw said.

Malone said he supports the school system's decision to maintain the small school experiment at East Wake High School.

But said he expects the administration will be asked to revisit their decision regarding the creation of a magnet school in the eastern part of the county.