Second time around: Coates-Ellis joins two others headed to city council

MANASSAS — The second time was the charm for Theresa Coates-Ellis.

The Republican who lost her 2016 bid for Manassas City Council turned it around Tuesday night, winning a seat she had, essentially, sought for more than four years.

She joins Democrats Michelle Davis-Younger, and incumbent Ken Elston who also won Tuesday. They’ll take their seats on a new council come January.

The long-serving Republican Marc Aveni lost his re-election bid Tuesday. Democrat Rex Parr, who was making his second attempt in as many election cycles at a city council seat, also lost.

By the numbers, with more than 6,100 votes, Davis-Younger was the top vote getter followed by Coates-Ellis.

For this second-time-around candidate, this election felt different. She made education a priority and, this time, she says, it was teachers who put her over the top.

“I have connections that run deep in a lot of different parts of our city,” said Coates-Ellis. “But when I ran in 2016, I didn’t feel like the education world understood me.”

Working with students is how the candidate who works in property management by day made a name for herself. She started a website and handed cameras to Osbourn High School students and told them to go out and document what they see in the community.

Then she began connecting city students with internships with businesses. For someone who got her college degree later in life, Coates-Ellis championed career and technical education in the city for those students who may not go to college but rather work in the trades.

This time, she said, educators got it.

“There’s what I call quiet teacher outreach. Teachers are extremely careful with politics. They don’t want it in the schools. But there are lot teachers whispering… ‘help.” They can’t say it out loud but they wanted to have a voice,” said Coates-Ellis.

When she begins in tenure on the council, she’ll become embroiled in the debate on how to adequately fund the city’s school division. The council sets the tax rate and collects taxes, but, by law, hands over the money to the city school board to do with it what they will.

And that members of that board have long called for more funding, leaving city leaders with the task of raising city property taxes — some of which are already the highest in Virginia — or cutting services.

Coates-Ellis says she won’t advocate for raising taxes. She wants more parental involvement in the schools.

“I’m not hearing from teachers that more money is going to solve our problems,” she adds.