The Education Foundation Board has new leadership in place.
Eight members of the met on March 21, and the March meeting is when the yearly officers are elected.
President Tina Mercer and vice-president Marcus Love were nominated for the position of president, and Love won the vote 5-3.
With Love vacating the vice-president role, Gary Taylor, who is a new appointee to the Board from the City of Jackson, was elected as the new vice-president.
This solidifies that the leadership for the next year will be two of the original members of the Board when it began in 2017 after the lawsuit between Madison County and the City when the City pulled its $6 million of annual funding for JMCSS and the County sued for it.
Melisa Summar was re-elected to her role of secretary. But before she was unanimously voted to continue in her role, she had a blunt message for the rest of the members of the Board.
“I’ve been a member of this for two years now, and we keep having the same conversations over and over again, and it’s really frustrating,” Summar said. “I know whenever I wake up in the morning and we have a meeting that day, I have a purpose to get something done for the school district and for the students.
“And I want to make sure that we all have that goal. I don’t care what’s happened in the past or what has or hasn’t gone on. We need to begin moving forward as a Board and continue to move forward.”
Everyone at the table expressed agreement with Summar’s concerns before all raising their hand in support of her when it came time to vote for her for secretary.
Before the votes, there was about an hour of conversation about a few things.
The Board will once again sponsor this year the JMCSS Gala in April and the ACT 30-plus luncheon that JMCSS has to honor those who’ve made a 30 or higher on the ACT.
There was discussion about anything else they could possibly do, but Mercer, who led the discussion until the election of officers at the end of the meeting, reminded the Board that anything the Foundation does must be approved by the Superintendent and by the Board according to the bylaws.
There was some question about that, including from board member Trey Cleek who read an excerpt from the bylaws that led him to believe they didn’t need the Superintendent’s approval.
There was also continued discussion about the more than $700,000 the Foundation never received from Madison County according to Mercer. Members of the County Commission have said in multiple interviews that when it came time each year for the County to send its funds to the Foundation, there were five years in which it was dormant, and those funds went from then-Trustee John Newman straight to JMCSS.
Mercer said in the meeting on Thursday that Superintendent Marlon King said they looked and never found a line in the budget where that money came in.
After the election of officers, both Love and Taylor said they will look at both County and JMCSS financial statements from those five years and see which side is correct.
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news
