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       A week after a Fairfax County School Board candidate was disqualified from the race, a judge reversed the order and the elections office reinstated her candidacy.

       Marcia St. John-Cunning, a Democrat-endorsed candidate for the Franconia district school board seat, was disqualified from the race last week because she incorrectly stated her address on one page of the 13-page candidacy petition form. The error invalidated all the voter signatures on the page, bringing her total number of signatures under the threshold of 125 needed to qualify as a candidate.

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       St. John-Cunning argued in circuit court this week that she had received more than 125 signatures before the filing deadline but did not submit the additional pages because the elections office said she had already qualified.

       The judge reviewed and approved the two additional pages of signatures that St. John-Cunning collected before the filing deadline, allowing the elections office to reconsider her candidacy. On Wednesday evening — a week after she was disqualified — St. John-Cunning was reinstated to the ballot.

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       In an interview, St. John-Cunning, who worked for Fairfax County Public Schools as a family liaison and family engagement regional representative, said she was happy that the decision would restore the votes of more than 3,000 voters who cast a ballot before she was disqualified. Early voting began on Sept. 22 and runs through Saturday. Election Day is on Tuesday.

       “I'm not a politician. I've worked in schools for over 25 years, and the reason that I decided to do this was to help the schools. So all of this kind of piece of trying to get on the school board is something that is completely unfamiliar to me,” she said. “So when all of this happened, number one, it was unexpected, because I believed that once the registrar qualified you they were the final authority on that.”

       Meet the candidates for Fairfax County School Board

       The 8th Congressional District Republican Party filed the petition to disqualify St. John-Cunning in Circuit Court on Oct. 13. School board races in Virginia are nonpartisan, but local parties typically endorse candidates. In nearly every school board seat up for election, there are only two candidates running: one endorsed by the local Democratic Party and one by the Republican Party.

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       St. John-Cunning faces Republican-endorsed Kevin Pinkney.

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       The Fairfax school board oversees the state’s largest school system, serving more than 180,000 students in nearly 200 schools. All 12 seats on the board, which develops and manages the district’s $3.5 billion budget and makes key decisions about school policies, are up for election.

       According to the complaint, St. John-Cunning incorrectly stated her address on one page of the candidacy petition form. She listed her street number as 4429, but it is 4221. She wrote it correctly on the other 12 pages. The 4429 address does not exist.

       “It was just one of those things that I was filling out all of the sheets, and I just did a mistake,” St. John-Cunning said. “It was a human, honest human error.”

       The Republican Party argued that the mistake invalidated all the signatures on that page, bringing the total number of signatures under 125, and that Eric Spicer, the Fairfax County general registrar and director of elections, had incorrectly approved St. John-Cunning’s petition for candidacy.

       Last week, St. John-Cunning pivoted to running a campaign as a write-in candidate. She resumed campaigning as a qualified candidate on Wednesday evening.

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