Sarah Carda and incumbent Jim Fitzgerald won the two open Yankton School District (YSD) school board seats.

Voter turnout was at just 13.6 percent this year. In 2012, voter turnout was 24.5 percent, while in 2011 they were 17 percent.

“I assume the winter weather might have played a factor in the low turnout,” said YSD business manager Jason Bietz.

Fitzgerald received nearly 41 percent of the vote (1,235 total votes), while Carda received more than 37 percent of the vote (1,126 votes). Duane “Butch” Becker came in third with nearly 14 percent of votes, while Wayne Wurth came in fourth with almost 8 percent of votes.

“With the three-year term on the school board, I hope to get back to the basics,” Carda said. “I want to be able to say that YSD provides the best education for students and kids in the community.”

She added that superintendent interviews, which will be held Thursday, will be “huge.”

“YSD has not had a lot of opportunities for a change in leadership for a lot of years,” Carda said. “It’s a major time, and a good time to make changes and to move forward.”

She stated that she will not come to the YSD school board with an agenda, and will take time learning the ropes and budget in order to make the best decisions for the school.

Fitzgerald said more work needs to be done.

“We have some big decisions to make here coming up with the budgets and the superintendent selection on Thursday,” he said. “I want to just keep punching away to continue to guarantee a good educational process for the kids of Yankton.”

He said Thursday is important in order to pick a new superintendent with good leadership to continue to lead the district the way its been led. He added that it’s also important that the budget issues be worked out.

“We have to continue to try and close the budget gap within the next few years,” said Fitzgerald, who won his second three-year term Tuesday. “We have some funds that we can continue to dip into a little bit further, but at some point, if the gap isn’t closed, we would either have to look at programs and classes to eliminate, which would decrease the opportunities for students.”

He did add that he’s confident the budget gap can be closed.

“My first goal with the new term is that we can continue to offer a good education for kids in Yankton with options for them,” Fitzgerald said. “We need to make sure that we’re not just offering a bare-boned education here.”

He said his experience should help him for his new term.

“Learning the school board system is a pretty big task, so it takes a while to understand the process,” Fitzgerald said. “Even after three years, I’m still learning some of the ins and outs on how the school system works, especially when dealing with state and federal funding.”

You can follow Andrew Atwal on Twitter at twitter.com/andrewatwal