The votes are in and I did not receive enough to be reelected to the school board. My term will end in December. I feel disappointed for my supporters who wanted me on the board and so I wanted to share a little about what we have accomplished over the past few years and how I ended up on the school board.
I was a teacher at WLES and loved my students, their families, and my fellow teachers. But I was shocked by some of the things happening behind the scenes in our school district, particularly how students from disadvantaged backgrounds were treated.
I was selected as a teachers union building representative and tried to advocate for our elementary school students and my fellow K-3 teachers. In the union’s discussion meetings, I found that our district’s administration team (who have all left) and union leaders seemed fine with a school system that worked well for advantaged students and often failed disadvantaged students. My fellow teachers tried to provide the best possible educational experience for students, even when they weren’t receiving the support they needed from school and district administration and union leadership.
I made the difficult decision to leave teaching and decided that I could better help disadvantaged children as a social worker. I enrolled in a master’s program, graduated, and am now working as a licensed social worker directly helping children in need.
Leaving the classroom was the right decision for me, but I could not ignore the way that our students were being treated. I reached out to school board members to describe the issues and lack of support and was surprised to learn that they were aware but not willing to take any action. Loyalty to the superintendent seemed to be their primary focus.
I attended school board meetings in other districts and read about the oversight that school boards are supposed to provide. The more I learned, the more concerned I was about how our board operated. For example, at the April 2019 school board meeting where the school board voted to fire all the first-year teachers at WLES and WLIS, the agenda item was titled “enrollment projections.” There was no discussion of this or other items. No one asked questions. The school board just rubber stamped every item up for a vote. The union did nothing to try to prevent the reduction in force. Student enrollment was higher the next year and the school district had to do last-minute hiring to replace the teachers who left because of the reduction in force notification.
I decided to run for school board in 2020 and during the campaign, I discovered how difficult it was to access school documents. Public information that should have been posted online a few days before each school board meeting was kept permanently confidential. The school district would not share anything with the public, but was required to submit some reports to the state which was where I had to go to learn anything about the finances.
One of my most troubling discoveries involved the district’s construction debt. Our community had been told the district was borrowing approximately $50 million for construction projects, but the actual borrowing was nearly double this amount. At the time, our district had the second highest level of debt per student in the state. Not only did the district take on much more debt than they told the public, the payments were structured to increase each year in a way that seriously limits the district’s ability to borrow until 2039.
During the 2020 election, the community became aware of the RDP PAC that was organized in 2016 to keep an “outsider” from being elected to the board. The PAC was very active in the 2020 election raising more than $40,000 to influence the election and keep candidates who challenged the status quo from being elected.
14 candidates ran for 4 seats on the board. The PAC was successful in getting 3 of their slate of 4 candidates on the board. I was not elected in 2020, but decided that the most important problem was that the community had no way to know what the school district was doing. I started my website to share public documents to help community members stay informed.
At first, I had to submit a public records request for each document and while the district eventually provided some documents to comply with my request, they refused to provide others. I filed a complaint with Indiana’s Public Access Counselor challenging the district’s policy that public documents shared with board members were to be strictly confidential. In Mumford v. West Lafayette Community School Corp., the Indiana Public Access Counselor ruled that our school corporation had violated Indiana law by denying public access to the school board packet.
As a result, the school board revised the policy to allow posting of the board packet after each meeting. This was an important step towards transparency, but finding the information on the website was challenging and there was still no way to know what was being voted on until after the meeting. It needed to be easier for community members to know what was being discussed and decided. I began putting together school board meeting agendas with direct links to the public documents and sharing them with our community.
The school board meeting agendas and minutes provided very little information about what was actually discussed or decided. So I began writing my own summaries of school board meetings to help community members understand what was happening.
In 2022, I was elected to the school board, giving me the opportunity to turn the goals that had motivated me from the beginning into meaningful action: increasing transparency, improving access to public information, and ensuring our community had a stronger voice in district decisions.
The PAC had a slate of candidates for the 2022 election but was less successful this time getting only 1 of their 3 candidates on the board. This produced a board with 3 non-PAC supported candidates. In the 6 years prior there had only been 1 non-PAC board member and the board had set a policy to not allow this board member to do anything other than vote without support from a second member of the board. There was still very little discussion at meetings with the board leadership shutting down any comments they did not like. The 1 non-PAC member was told that her role was to vote with and support the majority because having a unified board was most important. Now with 3 non-PAC members on the board, meetings had a great deal of discussion. With all the questions, it became clear to the public what was being voted on.
In January, the board will still have 2 non-PAC members, so I’m hopeful that questions and discussion will continue. They will get a lot of pressure from the other members to stay silent, vote with the majority, and support the majority’s decisions in order to show board unity. I hope they don’t give into the pressure. Open disagreement on the board is a good thing. There is more than one path forward and the community should hear about the options.
Just 4 months after joining the board, my constant reminder that the board was not following Indiana law resulted in the board removing the policy requiring board members to keep the documents in the board packet confidential. Public board packets became available before meetings. Also, after years of asking, the district began emailing school board meeting agendas with active links to public documents to the school community before meetings. This is a big improvement because instead of learning about important decisions after they were made, community members could review information ahead of time, ask questions, and share concerns with board members before a vote.
I have also been encouraged to see an increase in community members asking questions at school board meetings and being treated respectfully by our current superintendent. This is how it should be! Our schools belong to our community, and community members deserve to be informed and heard. The school board makes better decisions after seeking public input than when doing everything with so much secrecy that it is effectively behind closed doors.
With several years of the school district following a much more transparent process, I feel confident that the increased transparency will continue. As I finish my final two school board meetings, I will continue writing my meeting summaries. But I do not plan to continue once I am no longer on the board in January.
This means that an important area that needs improvement is our school board minutes. Although the minutes are much better than when I was first elected, they provide only limited information about the actual discussions and reasons for the board’s decisions. It also takes almost a month before the community can access them. I believe it is completely reasonable for the school board to share draft minutes with the public within a week of each meeting, clearly labeled as drafts until approved. The minutes should help people understand what was discussed, what questions were asked, and why decisions were made. Community members should feel more informed after reading them, not more confused. As is so often the case with our school board, it will likely take community pressure to get the board to improve the minutes. Trying to get accurate information added to the minutes was a frequent battle during my first two years on the board.
Another important priority for the new school board is improving our transfer student policy. Until a few months ago, our district did not have a written transfer policy, leaving transfer decisions in the hands of the superintendent. Our current superintendent accepted as many transfer students as possible, even when class sizes were already large.
With the passage of the referendum and a transfer student policy that provides some limits, our district has an opportunity to rethink how we approach student transfers. The state has reduced the amount of funding that comes with transfer students and there is the cost of increased class sizes and the effects on the educational experiences for students who live in our district. I believe our community’s priorities should guide the transfer policy. That means accepting some transfer students to balance grade size, but in a very limited way.
As I look to the future, one of my greatest hopes is that school board candidates in our small district will be elected without the backing of a PAC with a large campaign budget. Serving on a school board should be about a person’s desire to serve students, families, and the community. Financial support of a PAC to a slate of candidates should be seen as a negative. For me, I will never vote for any school board candidate running as a group with other candidates.
We have seen the influence of PACs and organized candidate slates in our school board elections in 2016, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026. The PAC changed its name from the RDP-PAC to the Citizens for Quality Education PAC. As community members became more informed, Amy Austin’s personal PAC was used in 2024 and then Maria Koliantz’s personal PAC in 2026. This allows a small group of major donors to fund and promote a slate of candidates.
I don’t believe this is healthy for our school district. Our community deserves school board members who think independently, listen to different perspectives, and make decisions based on what is best for our students, teachers, and families, rather than feeling obligated to the people or groups who helped them get elected. Our community deserves to hear diverse perspectives from board members delivered in respectful ways. Bullying non-PAC board members to stay silent and support the majority is bad for our community.
My hope is that in 2028 there will be a number of individual candidates running for school board independently and not as part of a slate. They shouldn’t need large donations, endorsements, or the support of a PAC to be elected.
I love this community. I am grateful for the people who have asked questions, spoken up, challenged decisions, shared information, and helped bring about meaningful change.
We have come a long way from where we were just 6 years ago. But I hope our community will continue to expect transparency, ask questions, and make its voice heard.
