Coral Springs resident with history of school advocacy running for school board

Volunteer school advocate and Coral Springs resident Nicole Morst has thrown her hat in the ring to run for District 4’s school board seat.

District 4 in northwest Broward includes Coral Springs, Parkland, Margate, Tamarac and North Lauderdale.

Morst is the chair of the North Area Advisory Council, a group of volunteers made up of community stakeholders ranging from parents, teachers, administrators and staff who act as liaisons and advocate to the school district for students’ needs.

“I think I’ve hit the limit of what I’m able to do, and so now I would like a seat at the table to actually vote on the changes that we bring,” Morst told the Coral Springs News. “Because we can bring it to them, but we can’t make them vote on it.”

Morst, who moved to Florida from Texas in 2017, has one child in 11th grade in Broward County Public Schools, and she has two older kids who have graduated.

“I became involved in this district the day that I got here,” Morst said. “I immediately saw a need at the middle school that I enrolled my daughter in, and they didn’t have a single point of entry. I started talking to the district staff, going to school board meetings, rallying parents, advocating for getting a single point of entry and some updated cameras.”

Morst is running against Sharry Kimmel, a professor of teacher education at Broward College, after current school board member Lori Alhadeff shared she won’t seek re-election.

As a stay-at-home mom, Morst has been involved in her kids’ education in as many ways as she could be, from volunteering as a room mom, chairing school committees and serving as president of the Parent Teacher Student Organization at Coral Glades High School.

Morst said with the advisory council, she’s dealt with issues such as pushing for metal detectors and vape detectors in schools, assessing whether elementary students are overtested, fighting for an equitable school boundary policy, and, of course, fielding discussion on the Redefining Our Schools initiative that ultimately saw the closure of six schools.

Now, the district has to figure out how to slow, if not reverse, the underenrollment crisis it is facing, an issue that future school board members will have to tackle.

“I think that Broward Schools is really going to have to work on marketing the programs that they have, they’re going to have to work on really building community trust,” Morst said. “I think they’ve lost a lot of trust from the community from their financial mismanagement.”

Morst said the job of the advisory committee is to dig into the “meat and potatoes,” taking a closer look at policy and budget documents.

For instance, Morst recounted how her group recently discovered rollover funds that were being kept from schools, so she and a team member met with the budget office, passed a motion with their members, and not long after, a memo was sent out about how $2.3 million was going to be returned to the schools.

“I feel like sometimes the board, they just take the staff’s word for things, right,” she said. “And that’s not a bad thing, because I believe most of the staff that we work with are honest and they’re doing their best, but sometimes you have to push back and ask the why.”

One recent controversy regarding oversight was the approval — and subsequent termination — of a $2.6 million office lease that school board members ultimately said was an unnecessary expense. Terminating the lease has now led to a lawsuit against Broward Schools.

While Morst won’t have a child in BCPS much longer, she said she’s still interested in continuing her work, describing schools as “the heart of the community.” She and her husband decided to move to Coral Springs because of the good public schools, adding charter schools don’t offer the same promise of quality education.

“Strong community schools build strong communities,” she said. “You want families, you have to have good schools.”

Morst has also been involved with the Coral Springs Parent Education Group, which earned her a spotlight from the city in 2024.

“I’m a public servant at heart. I serve at my church, I was a basketball coach, cheerleading coach, so that’s just kind of who I am,” Morst said. “And I think that’s what the school board is. The school board member should be someone who serves their constituents. They bridge the gap between the parents and the teachers and the district.”

Candidates can get on a Florida ballot by paying a qualifying fee or collecting a certain number of signatures equaling at least 1% of the registered voters in that area. Morst is opting to go the second route, which means she’ll have to get about 1,700 signatures, since there were roughly 168,928 active voters in the District 4 school board area as of 2024.

“I just think it is a testament to how people feel about you, that they are willing to print them out, sign them, take them to their family members,” Morst said. “So if I have the trust of the community, that they’re willing to go above and beyond and do that to help me, that means a lot, and it tells me that I’m on the right track.”

This story was originally published January 30, 2026 at 1:20 PM.