The Columbus school board will have two new faces come January, with former Columbus teacher Hanifah Kambon and South Side truck driver Mike Wiles joining the board in January.

Incumbent Ramona Reyes and board President Carol Perkins also kept seats on the board. Reyes won the most votes of any candidate, based on unofficial results last night.

"I think it's going to be a good team," said Kambon, an educational consultant who taught in the Columbus district for 30 years. She is 57 and lives on the East Side.

"Now the real work begins," Wiles said. "Everything that I brought up in my campaign wasn't just rhetoric."

He said he will focus his efforts on discipline issues, directing money to classrooms instead of administrative expenses, and creating neighborhood councils to advise the district.

Perkins kept her seat by winning a separate race from the other three winners. In the contest for a partial, two-year term, Perkins won in a landslide. She received 7,857 votes to challengers Paul Timothy Carringer's 2,380 and Lemuel E. Harrison Jr.'s 213.

"I'm ecstatic," Perkins said after learning of the news close to 1 a.m.

Asked where the district goes from here, she responded: "We keep the progress going for students. We have a lot of great programs in the pipeline, and we're going to continue to move in the right direction."

(Read more about the write-in contest on the E-Team blog.)

In the race for full-term seats, Kambon, Wiles and Reyes -- whose names were actually on the ballot -- won handily over their write-in challengers. Only 8,678 write-in votes were cast in the race. In comparison, Wiles, who trailed among the winning candidates, received 37,638 votes.

Kambon said the new board members will embrace change, use statistics in their decision-making, and work to help Superintendent Gene Harris "get the job done."

Kambon said she hopes to put some of her knowledge using teaching-assessment techniques to work in Columbus classrooms to improve student learning.

With all precincts counted, Reyes had 42,459 votes. Reyes said she was surprised that she was come in first but had been working hard to reach out to the community.

She was appointed to the board in January in part to add representation of Latinos. The 40-year-old human-resources specialist at Nationwide Insurance is president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

She said she wants the district to communicate better with people who don't speak English. "We're not being as effective with that as we could be," she said.

For example, Reyes said she'd like planned meetings on possible school closings to have a Spanish-language interpreter.

Wiles, 54, a driver for a storage company, might become the board's most unconventional member. Not a fan of the board's "policy governance" model, in which the board sets broad policies and delegates most operational power to the superintendent, he said in the campaign that he hopes to bring a more hands-on type of oversight to the board.

Because there were three open seats and only three names on the ballot, the only thing that could have upset this outcome were the three write-in candidates: Tracy Broaddus, William L. "Bill" Buckel and Thomas Ruff.

William A. Anthony Jr., chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party, said he was not surprised that the write-ins attracted so few votes.

"Write-ins are so difficult, and this is a low-turnout cycle," he said.

bbush@dispatch.com