By Tyler Schneider
The Hickman Mills Board of Directors has finally elected its president. Both of them.
The decision comes after a tumultuous late spring and early summer in which directors walked out during an April 18 meeting to protest the leadership of previous board president Carol Graves, whose leadership was also questioned publicly.
The board held a special session Aug. 3, where members named Anne Coleman and Irene Kendrick as co-presidents for a temporary period of at least two months.
“Let me start off by saying this is an unusual arrangement,” HMC-1 Superintendent Yaw Obeng said. “Other districts have not done it.”
With that understood, he said, “it’s under the board’s purview to decide how they want to structure the board.”
Obeng initially floated the idea of a co-presidency at the board’s May 25 meeting. At that point, the seven-member board had failed to put together a passing vote on its leadership in part due to a vacancy left when Terri Barr-Moore submitted a letter of resignation mere days after the April 4 election.
With just six members seated, the board clashed often, culminating in a number of heated exchanges between Graves, Kendrick, and Beth Boerger, in particular. On any attempt, the vote was almost always split 3-3 — with newcomer Brandon Wright voting in solidarity with Kendrick and Boerger against Coleman, Graves, and Byron Townsend.
The Aug. 3 meeting became necessary after the board allowed the Missouri School Board Association’s July 15 deadline to come and go without electing a president, vice-president or treasurer. An annual board retreat, scheduled for June 9, never got off the ground, either.
Graves, who was initially in talks to share the co-presidency duties with Kendrick, was notably absent from these Aug. 3 proceedings. She has not responded to The Telegraph’s request for comment.
With the other five members onboard and sitting alongside other district officials in a U-shaped roundtable setting, Obeng reiterated that the interim co-presidency would last “until you have a discussion around the board vacancy and fill that vacancy.”
Stepping up despite sharing a number of her own apprehensions in previous meetings, Coleman suggested setting a firm timeline for when the co-presidency was to be dissolved in favor of a traditional leadership structure.
Members agreed to set this temporary period for two months, with the goal of having the seventh and tie-breaking board member nominated and confirmed by then.
The roll-call vote passed 4-1, with Byron Townsend as the lone dissenter in Graves’ absence.
“I personally found no one in the community that actually supports the [co-presidency] idea,” Townsend said in the May 25 meeting.
Boerger was strongly in favor of the motion.
“If you Google the Hickman Mills School District, you will find that this board has been in turmoil for many years, going back to at least 2014,” she said. “I look at this as a way to start a healing process, to provide leadership and leadership in a positive, constructive manner, and to develop trust amongst the board.”
Before the board can post a request for candidates to fill its seventh vacancy, Obeng reminded members that the current board could benefit from listing out a set of criteria for what they saw as a fitting candidate.
The district posted an initial request for a replacement board member earlier this year. This included notices in a handful of local papers, including the Martin City Telegraph, but they weren’t published until the same day as the filing deadline.
Board members determined that the desired qualifications for the next member should include previous experience serving on a school board. Kendrick went as far as to say she believed any board experience would be beneficial. Members also noted that it was important to try and ensure that whoever did take that seventh seat had plans to seek reelection in the following election cycle.
“I want to make it clear to anybody that wants to apply, that even if they feel like they don’t fit the criteria, they do have a right to apply,” Townsend said.
Boerger acknowledged the diversity of the current board, but noted that it still fell short of echoing the proportion of Hispanic students in the district. She said HMC-1 should seek to draw candidates from that or other minority backgrounds, if possible.
This led to another important consideration that has been following Hickman Mills’ leadership for years — in particular, the district’s sizable bilingual population.
As far as this could be applied to appointing the seventh board member, board members suggested that, when the vacancy is posted, it should appear in Spanish language news outlets as well as The Call, and other minority-led papers.
While Graves’ future with the board is uncertain both because of these recent controversies and due to her own health concerns, the move to name a pair of co-presidents was a sign that the rest of the board may be willing to put disagreements aside on behalf of a district with a desperate need to regain its full-accreditation.