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Lexington City Council last week interviewed four candidates to serve on the city’s school board for a term that begins July 1 and heard an updated procedure for how the board will transition form an appointed board to an elected board.
The School Board seat, currently held by Mollie Fox, will be filled by one of four candidates who submitted their names and resumes to Council for consideration: Sandra Hayslette, Mary Beth Manjerovic, Thomas Stuart and Alexander Thymmons. All four candidates were asked questions by members of City Council in a candidate forum-style interview. -Hayslette is a graduate of Lexington High School and a former teacher with the Rockbridge County school system, with 14 years experience of teaching at the middle school and high school level. She’s also worked as a college instructor and is currently the director of Christian Education at Lexington Presbyterian Church. The city’s school system, she said is “the linchpin to Lexington’s vitality” and “staffed by an absolute gem of a team.”
“We have an embarrassment of riches and I am very much interested in figuring out ways to sustain that on into the future,” she said. “Teachers and staff of our schools are their life blood and that’s something I take very seriously.”
One of the questions asked by members of Council centered around the role of the School Board in instances where parents are asking for books to be removed from school libraries, an issue that has come before a lot of school boards in recent years. Hayslette said that she had served on book review committees during her time teaching at Rockbridge County High School and from that experience she learned that “having the parents have the ability to have a voice and be seen and heard by the district and have some mechanism to express how what felt was a key element of the work.”
The candidates were also asked about how they would help promote more diversity in the city’s school system. Hayslette said she would have to learn more about how the schools currently go about recruiting staff, but would work to help the schools “go out and strategically recruit the people we need to recruit.” One potential source of future educators for the city’s school’s system, she noted was the Multicutural Student Union at Rockbridge County High School w hich h as “ five o r six kids who want to be teachers” and to potentially make coming and working in Lexington City Schools an appealing option, even if only for a little while.
“[Diversity] is important,” she said. “It’s vitally important that students see people who look like them.”
Manjerovic is an assistant professor of biology at the Virginia Military Institute, but noted that “more importantly, I am a parent of three daughters in Lexington City Schools.”
One of the main reasons she said she decided to seek an appointment to the School Board was that the pandemic brought to light the direct impact school boards can have on children’s education and that she and many other parents “became very frustrated at the lack of our ability to do anything about our kids’ education.
“We realize that Lexington is a very special place where community actually means something and I feel like we don’t capitalize on that enough between the parents, the PTA, the School Board and the City Council,” she said.
If appointed, Manjerovic said she would work to increase communication between parents and the School Board as a body. The current members of the Board, she noted are “always willing to discuss things and get back to you” if approached individually, but that that kind of dialogue “doesn’t scale up en masse.”
“One-on-one meetings with people are great, but … we need to try to get more parents involved and more support, so I feel like that one-on-one discussion with people doesn’t scale up,” she said. “It would be nice to have a place where parents and educators and anyone who is interested can have a discussion rather than come and say their two-minute piece and that’s all the discussion that is allowed.”
That increased communication would help in issues like discussions about the appropriateness of books available in the school’s libraries.
“As a parent I want some say in what my kids are exposed to, but as a parent I also know that kids can find anything they want, and I’m very realistic in [understanding] that just banning things will oftentimes make kids more curious,” she said. “I think parents need to still, of course, be heard, and that’s why I feel like we need more discussion between parents and our educators and our School Board.”
She specifically pointed to the efforts by Lylburn Downing Middle School librarian Theresa Bridge, who came up with a system of labeling books with potentially sensitive material, which Manjerovic said she was “very impressed with.”
“I think there is a way, by labeling books and allowing parents the ability to say ‘Yes, my kid can access the YA books’ or ‘no they can’t,’” she said. “I think that gives parents the choice, but still has those books available for those who are curious.”
As to the issue of promoting diversity, she noted that there are three colleges with education programs within the county and “if we could reach out to them and retain people, especially people of color in those programs, that would be a big way to support diversity.” -Stuart owns Tommy’s Arcade in downtown Lexington, but prior to moving to the city he was a professional educator for five years, teaching in Japan, Iowa, Ohio and Michigan, primarily at the elementary school level. Since moving to Virginia, he’s worked as a private tutor and has done some volunteer tutoring at LDMS. He also has two children, the oldest of which will start kindergarten this fall. His experience with the city’s school system is limited, but has been “nothing but positive.”
“I’ve spoken to some of the teachers and administrators and I think very highly of them, and that’s one of the reasons I want to help out if I can,” he said.
When it comes to potentially removing books from the libraries, Stuart said he would want to get “as much community feedback as possible before making any decisions.”
“Generally, I think access to more knowledge is better and censorship should be used very sparingly,” he said, “but we’re talking about children, and the community should have the overwhelming say in how things are run and as a School Board member, I think it would be my job to do my best to hear the concerns of the community and weigh in as each incident comes up.”
Promoting diversity within the school system, Stuart said, “is a very noble goal,” and that he “would prefer to see the educator population reflect the population of the community.” He also promoted the idea of finding students in the community who were interested in pursuing careers in education and “pitching the idea of them coming back to teach here.”
Thymmons was born in Romania and currently leads the Lexington VFW Post. He has experience with education working as a VFW Education and Service officer. He added that he has two children, one of whom is in the school system, “so I have a vested interest in making sure that our city schools continue to grow in the right direction.”
One way he proposes doing that is encouraging “global programs” like Model UN to come into the schools.
“There’s so many opportunities out there, and I’ve had a great education in a public [school] system and I want to make sure that my kids have the same education growing up,” he said.
Thymmons said that he views the role of the school board to be, in part, a mediator in issues like removing books form the school libraries.
“I think it’s important for the teachers to be recognized and it’s important for the teachers to be respected, but it’s also important to recognize the involvement of the parents,” he said. “There’s got to be a way, leaving politics aside, to decide what’s in the best interest of the children, and I think that can be done.”
While he didn’t offer any specific solutions on how to increase diversity in the schools, Thymmons did agree that more diversity would be beneficial to the school system.
“I’ve seen it in my VFW post where we have veterans of color and they’re really making an amazing difference in our post,” he said. “I really think promoting diversity in our school system is critical.”
-All four candidates expressed encouragement over the fact that there were four highly-qualified candidates seeking the appointment to the school board.
“I don’t envy you having to choose,” Manjerovic said. “You have four people who are all interested in our community and that’s a wonderful thing. We all recognize how amazing this school system is, and I’m just hoping to contribute in any way that I can.”
“I don’t think there’s a bad decision here,” Stuart added. “I think whoever you choose will be a good addition to the School Board.”
-Council will make its final decision on which candidate will be appointed at its next meeting on June 15.
Whichever candidate is appointed would be among the School Board members running in the first election in the fall of 2024. Hayslette, Manjerovic and Thymmons all said that they would run for election if they had the support, while Stuart said that he wouldn’t actively campaign in an election, but “if elected I would absolutely serve.”
“I think it’s a great thing that we’re moving to a place where the position is going to be elected, because I find that we’re going to have an interesting pool of candidates that’s maybe a little more diverse, so I look forward to seeing what’s going to happen in a few years once we get that started,” Thymmons said. -Following the interviews, City Attorney Jeremy Carroll updated Council on the procedure for transitioning from an appointed school board to an elected board, which differed from the procedure outlined by Lexington’s director of elections, Jackie Harris, to Council last October prior to the election. Harris reported then that, in addition to the seat that Council is currently looking to fill, the seats held by Katherine Shester and Michael Saunders would be the o nes e lected fi rst, w ith the terms being extended through the end of 2024. The terms for the seats currently held by Board Chair Tim Diette and Vice Chair Tammy Dunn would be extended through the end of 2026 and those seats would be elected for the first time in that year’s election.
Carroll, however, informed Council that, under section 22.1-57.3 of the Virginia State Code which contains the guidelines for transitioning to an elected school board, the board will remain an appointed board until the first election occurs.
That means that the terms for Shester’s and Saunders’s seats would not be extended and those seats would come up for reappointment next summer and the first election for those seats would be the 2026 election. The seats held by Dunn, Diette, and whichever of the four candidates is appointed at the next meeting will be elected for the first time next fall. Following the respective elections, the terms for the school board seats will be extended from three years to four, with elections being staggered on the same cycle as the City Council seats.
