SUNDAY STORY:Determination and support

To some, she was a well-known face in the neighborhood, a woman who had served their children and schools for years. To others, she was merely a name, the third listed alphabetically — Asper, Collier, Yelsey — on a yard sign posted down the block.

Some people first heard of her when her mailer arrived at their doorstep — and then the next mailer, and the one after that. Some met her in person at a friend of a friend’s house, with coffee on the table and a sign-up sheet asking for handwritten endorsements.

Whether she was a dark horse or a hometown hero, Karen Yelsey hardly looked like a front-runner when she announced her candidacy for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board this summer. Over the next few months, however, she and her backers mounted an aggressive campaign, enlisting people around the community and stretching out each dollar. When the election results came in Wednesday morning, Yelsey had defeated longtime incumbent Serene Stokes — and pulled off the school board’s biggest upset in years.

“It was a grass-roots thing that started back in June, and now here we are,” said Michele Mutzke, a parent at Corona del Mar High School and one of the chief members of Yelsey’s campaign.

No one can say for sure why voters flocked to Yelsey — as of Saturday, she had 55.8% of the vote, the highest total of any Newport-Mesa candidate — although she had a number of positives on her side. The Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers, which also carried newcomer Michael Collier to victory, ran its own campaign for her, posting signs and calling thousands of voters. Moreover, with a new superintendent in office and the Measure F bond set to begin work, voters may simply have been in the mood for change.

But as a candidate who was barely known outside the Corona del Mar area, Yelsey faced an uphill battle in spreading her name across Newport-Mesa.

But she had a group determined to get her there.

“We were in this to win,” Yelsey said. “It wasn’t just to make a statement.”

So how did Yelsey go from underdog to winner? Three main strategies likely helped put her on top.

1. PITCH THE CANDIDATE

The race between Stokes and Yelsey was definitely not a political one. Both are Republicans, both have years of experience in the Corona del Mar school area, and both stand for many of the same issues: retaining teachers, supporting Measure F, bringing district technology up to date. When Yelsey set out to defeat Stokes, then, she advertised her credentials more than her platform.

Her first mailer, which went out in early October, promoted her “new voice, new ideas, new leadership” and argued that the school board needed to be more than a “rubber stamp” for the administration. Without taking any of Stokes’ positions to task, the mailer portrayed Stokes as having lingered on the board too long: “The incumbent trustee has served twelve years, and has had ample opportunity to implement any ideas she may once have had. We need vision and innovative thinking, which is what I have to offer.”

Yelsey has a number of specific ideas for improving Newport-Mesa schools — instating term limits for trustees, enlisting top students to tutor struggling ones — but her materials mostly shied away from details. Janet Callister, Yelsey’s campaign manager and longtime friend, said she had worked hard to keep the message simple.

“When you’re doing an ad or a mailer, people are not going to read a lot of text,” she said. “The idea is that you want to catch people’s attention with something that’s true, but you can’t go in depth. If people get bored, they’re just going to throw it away.”

Yelsey, with Callister and treasurer Susan Kramer behind her, sold herself as a champion of schools. One of her paid advertisements listed 35 former PTA and Parent Faculty Organization presidents who had endorsed her — with a note that they had all served during Stokes’ time on the board.

2. WORK THE COMMUNITY

At the beginning of September, a month after filing her candidacy, Yelsey met with two dozen of her closest friends and held a brainstorming session. The challenge: to take a candidate barely known outside her own neighborhood and spread her name across two cities.

To start with, Yelsey and her supporters formed committees for mailers, letters to the editor and more. Four women volunteered to be “captains” and plant signs around each of the high school zones. Still, Yelsey knew that she needed more than a few dedicated backers to get the word out. In the ensuing two months, she networked day and night, enlisting people both in and out of the education community to rally their friends.

Bill Sumner, the track coach at Corona del Mar High School and director of the Orange County Marathon, put out a pro-Yelsey e-mail to all his contacts in Newport-Mesa. Lantz Bell, the president of the Newport Harbor Baseball Assn., sent messages to dozens of youth sports families. Mary George, a friend of Yelsey’s who lives in San Juan Capistrano, wrote to corporations and asked them to pass the message on.

“People would ask me, ‘How can I support Karen Yelsey?’ ” Callister said. “And I would say, ‘Send an e-mail to everyone you know.’ ”

As the inboxes filled around town, Yelsey made herself visible in person. In October, she appeared at more than a dozen coffees and cocktail parties at parents’ homes, meeting with voters and answering questions. At each appearance, Yelsey set a sheet of stationery on the table and asked visitors to endorse her. More than 300 people signed their names.

3. LOCATE THE CROWD

With donations from dozens of Corona del Mar families, Yelsey easily led all candidates in money raised. Still, her campaign team didn’t just rely on the checkbook to get a wide audience. Often, Yelsey and Callister sought out crowds that were already assembled — and got their attention in unusual ways. To help make their candidate a household name, the campaigners printed “Team Yelsey” T-shirts and wore them wherever they could: at the gym, at the supermarket, at their weekly meetings at Peet’s Coffee in Corona del Mar. A group of women walked with the shirts at the Harbor Heritage Run, then did it later the same weekend at Newport Beach’s centennial celebration.

“It was sort of like a walking billboard,” said Linda Roberts, a former PTA president of Corona del Mar High. “En masse, it does kind of make a statement.”

The centennial also allowed for the campaign’s most elaborate stunt: As the parties raged along the shore, Callister paid for an airplane to fly overhead trailing a Yelsey banner.

On Halloween night, the campaign team gathered at Callister’s home on Balboa Island and arranged seven pumpkins on the front porch, featuring each letter of Yelsey’s name and an exclamation point. For the trick-or-treaters, Yelsey bought more than 200 full-size candy bars and applied a campaign sticker to each one.

The bars ran out by a quarter to seven. A week later, Yelsey was the trustee-elect.

“I’m sure she’s going to try very hard to do a good job,” said Stokes, a board member since 1994. “She put a lot of time, energy and money into this campaign.”

On Dec. 12, Yelsey will raise her right hand and be sworn in to the Newport-Mesa school board. She will join two other new trustees and a recently hired superintendent, and her docket will be full for the next four years — with Measure F set to begin work, Westside schools fighting to meet standards and the district starting on its most-ambitious-ever technology plan.

Those contact lists, it seems, may come in handy again.