Joseph Gollehon Jr. is in a unique position for a school board member in the New River Valley. Somebody is actually running against him in November.

"I think it's good that there's more interest," the retired teacher said of having to fight lawyer Richard Chidester for the Central District seat in Giles County. "However, I would be more comfortable if I wasn't challenged. That's a natural, foregone conclusion, I would think."

The last time Gollehon had an opponent was 1995, when Giles and other New River counties began electing school boards instead of appointing them.

Seventy-nine percent of school board seats were contested across Floyd, Giles, Montgomery and Pulaski counties in 1995. Since then, the popularity of running for school board has plummeted. No more than a third of seats for those school divisions have had more than one candidate on the ballot in subsequent elections.

This year is tied with 2003 for the lowest rate of contested seats on the November ballot: 7 percent. In hard numbers, 15 seats are up for grabs and only Gollehon faces a challenger.

One seat in Montgomery County has nobody on the ballot and will be decided by write-in votes. That is hardly unprecedented. Write-in candidates were the only ones for a seat in Montgomery County in 2005 and Pulaski County in 2003.

Radford has May school board elections and its votes are cast in different years than the other New River divisions so it was not included in the comparison above. But the city has not been awash with names on its school board ballots either. Four candidates sought three of the city's school board seats in 2006. Three sought two seats in 2004.

The quality of schools tends to be a major concern in a community. Schools usually account for the majority of a locality's budget. So why isn't a position on the school board more sought after?

Experts cite several reasons, including competing pressures from work and family and the fear of getting enmeshed in controversial issues.

But the biggest reason may be that, in Virginia, school boards don't have much power.

Federal and state mandates and testing requirements limit what say a board has in curriculum to the degree that boards can be "frustrated in the fact that they don't really have control," said Travis Twiford, associate professor of education at Virginia Tech's Hampton Roads Center in Virginia Beach.

And in the commonwealth, school boards have no power to generate school funds though local taxes, which is unusual compared with other states.

"It creates a real difficult way to make a strong political statement or have initiatives implemented by people in that role when you don't have that authority" to raise money, said Robert McCracken, a former school superintendent for Giles County who is now an adjunct at Radford University.

Now that they are elected rather than appointed, school board members are probably under more pressure from the public, said Frank Barham, executive director of the Virginia School Boards Association.

"The people demand that they know more than appointed boards used to," Barham said.

And in general, Barham said, serving on the school board these days "does take a lot more time and a lot more knowledge, especially about the financial operations, than it used to."

Barham said he did not have statistics but believed school board members were no more likely to run unopposed than other local officials. In the New River Valley, seven of 17, or 41 percent, of the races for the board of supervisors or the town council are contested this year.

Susan Morikawa, who decided not to seek re-election for the Montgomery County seat that will be decided by write-in votes, said she was surprised by the volume of paperwork. She cited a desire to have more time for family and her accounting work as the main reasons she is leaving the board.

In one of the more divisive issues her board faced in recent years, Morikawa supported plans to relocate a stadium for Blacksburg High School to an area of her district where many people opposed the plan.

"I can't say that it didn't have some impact on my decision," Morikawa said when asked if that experience also played a role in her choice not to run. "I thought that perhaps there might not be as much support in that neighborhood for me as there had been the first time, but it wasn't a deciding factor."

Randall Wertz, Montgomery County's voter registrar, encouraged write-in candidates to contact his office to make it aware who they are, but that is not required. On Friday, Wertz and Morikawa said they had heard of no emerging write-in candidates.

While having no candidate on the ballot for a school board seat can be read as a sign of apathy, it generally leads to competition that might not have been there had the incumbent stayed. Chris Harrison and Carter Effler were unopposed for re-election to Radford's school board when Harrison died in 2000. Six candidates launched write-in campaigns. Minnie Dean, who handed out pencils with her name on them while campaigning, got the most votes of any candidate. Effler came in second.