First four on the ballot; top four in our hearts; K.L.A.P. for West Lafayette Schools. Vote Koliantz, Lyle, Austin, and Purpura.
You get four votes. Use them all!
The West Lafayette School Board is a seven member board and has four of those seven positions up for election this year. (Of the four seats up for election, two current board members have decided not to run and the two others are running as incumbents for re-election.) All of the positions are “at-large” which means that, if you are a registered voter in the West Lafayette school district, you get four votes. There are six candidates running.
These candidates are the first four listed on the ballot. So, if you forget the names, just remember “Top Four and Get More!”
I would encourage any registered voters in the West Lafayette school district to vote for Amy Austin, Maria Koliantz, George Lyle, and David Purpura. Speaking broadly, I think these four have complementary skill sets, will be able to work together, and will be force-amplifiers for our teachers and our administration.
West Side is the best school system in Indiana and one of the best in the country, meaning that our administrators and teachers are doing a good job. That being the case, the school district will be well served by a board that supports the efforts and trusts the judgment of these professionals.
Amy Austin is an incumbent and is up for re-election. She is currently the board president and is doing a good job navigating the road blocks thrown up by a couple of obstruction-minded members of the board; allowing those members to have their say without unduly delaying and disrupting the business of the board. Hopefully as we elect new and better members, the need for that will diminish. Amy is willing to talk with anyone and has a level of empathy that is truly remarkable.
On top of that, she runs the administrative end of a family owned aerospace company. Being conversant with the federal grant bureaucracy gives her a leg up in navigating the complexities of school finance. More importantly, it lets her recognize that the school’s current CFO is even more conversant with school finance. She recognizes that, when the school hires competent professionals, the best thing the board can do is trust them to do their jobs.
Amy has also served as the legislative liaison for the school board and is acutely aware of the challenges faced by traditional public schools because of the nonsense coming out of the General Assembly. She is a voice for our school district at the state level. The experience Amy has gained over the previous four years will serve the school well if she is elected to another four year term.
Maria Koliantz is on the board of the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation where I had the pleasure of working with her for several years. (The Foundation is a non-profit with a mission of supporting the schools by raising money, funding teacher’s grants, facilitating student scholarships, running the backpack program to help families struggling with food insecurity, and so forth.) I know from personal experience that Maria works well in a board setting.
Maria is in the construction management business, and I have been fascinated by her accounts of constructing these absolutely enormous chicken and egg facilities. Capital projects are a very important part of what school districts have to manage and having a board member with insight into such projects will be invaluable. Managing large budgets and coordinating with diverse groups of people will not be foreign to her.
In addition, when her kids were younger and the family was in Detroit, Maria was deeply involved with a parent group and then the education foundation for those schools. Her experiences with those organizations obviously informed the quality observations she made and questions she asked during Foundation board meetings. All of this would be a real asset for the West Lafayette school board.
George Lyle is a lawyer and IT security professional working at Purdue who also worked as a journalist for several years. Again, those are skill sets that are not easily duplicated by others on the board which will serve the board well. More than once, I have seen the board get tied up in half-baked notions of what Indiana law requires. While a board member should not serve as a board attorney, having a basic sense of the legal issues faced by the school board will be helpful to making those board meetings more efficient.
George has expressed a desire to “turn the temperature down” on the board, and he has the demeanor to do it. He also noted, as part of his inspiration in this campaign, a meeting where our superintendent, Dr. Greiner, let his frustration show just a little bit. Anyone who knows Dr. Greiner recognizes that he is a calm individual, not given to showy outbursts. This was an indication of how the unwarranted insinuations by a couple of the members – in this case having to do with the process for hiring a new high school principal – was wearing on him. George is committed to managing the superintendent in a way that doesn’t undermine him when he is doing a good job.
I was fortunate to get to know George and his family on a personal level in the course of and after the 2022 school board campaign. The Lyles have very young children in the school system so they have insights into the elementary grades. As I can say from experience, memories of these younger grades tend to fade from view if you’re a parent with kids in high school and older. Consequently, he also has a vested interest in keeping the schools excellent for the long term. George’s commitment to our schools was demonstrated through his work with the group that organized the campaign to renew West Lafayette’s school referendum rate.
Finally, as an aging white guy, I am absolutely not the best voice for this, and I doubt George would ever make it a campaign point, but I think it’s worth noting that the board could benefit from the life experience of a Black person who might see aspects of our education system to which others without similar experiences might be oblivious.
David Purpura is a professor at Purdue with expertise in early childhood education. This is an area where West Side schools, good as they are, could use attention. He was also co-chair of the “Vote Yes for West Lafayette Schools” committee to renew the referendum rate.
As current President of the West Lafayette Park Board, he understands how to serve on a board and work with its other members. With experience managing an education research lab, he’s also knowledgeable about the types of bureaucracy that surrounds government funding and is comfortable managing large budgets. His experience speaks for itself and you can see his resume on his website, so I won’t spend a lot time talking David up; but he’s certainly qualified for the job.
Amy, Maria, George, and David would all be quality choices, and we’re lucky to have them running.
The other two candidates are Yue Yin and Beau Scott. I mostly want to focus on the reasons I’m voting for the four candidates above and don’t want to tear anyone down, so I’ll keep this part brief.
Dr. Yin is an incumbent and I don’t think she’s worked particularly well with the board. The most disappointing moment had to do with the selection of our current superintendent after Dr. Killion retired. It was apparent she wanted a different candidate and, when the rest of the board settled on Dr. Greiner, her supporters showed up to protest the selection, holding signs and generally tried to stop the process as she continued to level criticism at the selection process. Remembering that debacle, when the time came to hire a high school principal, teachers and those involved showed up en masse praising the process and urging a unanimous vote approving the hire. She disregarded their plea and voted “no” to the hire. Finally, she has thrown her lot in with Mumford whose monthly email blasts airing various grievances has degraded the atmosphere around the school board.
Beau seems like a good guy. He has a lot of charisma and a background in education. But I only get four votes, and I’m enthusiastic about the four candidates I’m endorsing. If I’m looking for reasons not to vote for him – other than the fact that I don’t get a fifth vote; I suppose it would be concerns about where he would land on the question of board leadership positions. His yard signs show up in the same yards as Dr. Yin’s. This, in turn, makes me worry that he’d vote Yin or Mumford into leadership positions on the board which, in turn, I worry would end up being detrimental to our superintendent, given that both of them were critical of the vote to hire him in the first place. But that’s speculation on my part, and Beau hasn’t said as much.
Michelle Kronk is an excellent school finance person, WL is lucky to have her.
Yeah she is! Michelle is fantastic.
If you work with any organization that is first class and where you find bright people working together, you discover that such a situation is built slowly, many times over the years, with a constant focus on quality and all that means. Politics be damned along with crazy people. Too many of those have worked hard to ruin the best of organizations. It often doesn’t take much to ruin it, a crazy person here and there and someone who has “an agenda” where “I’m going to get that superintendent” or such nonsense happens. If you have a fine school board and administration, that in itself, is an accomplishment in quality even before you evaluate what is happening in instruction, but if you have an excellent administration, you will have excellent instruction. Congratulations.
That’s true. It’s much easier to tear down than it is to build up.