By Greg Paeth
NKy Tribune senior reporter
Former Covington Board of Education member Krista Powers and Diane Brumback, who ran for the board last November, are among four candidates who have been interviewed by a state panel that will make a recommendation about who fills the vacancy created last November when Kerry Holleran resigned from the board.
The two other candidates who were interviewed last week at the Covington Independent Public Schools offices were April Frese Brockhoff and Todd Duesing.
Tom Miller, who ran for the school board unsuccessfully in 2012, applied for the position by completing an application with the state education department. But Miller did not go through the interview process last week and is therefore ineligible for the appointment, according to Nancy Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the education department.
The candidates were interviewed by John Thompson, a department of education employee who is Education Commissioner Terry Holliday’s designee for board member appointments; Jean Crowley, a former Danville Independent school board member, and Joe Brown, a member of the Garrard County school board, according to Nancy Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the education department.
Crowley and Brown are volunteers who were asked to help with the interviewing process and “have no connection to applicants or the district in question,” Rodriguez said.
The panel has been asked to make a recommendation to Holliday, who would then make the appointment to the five-person board. Rodriguez said the state hopes to have the new board member in place before the board’s Feb. 9 meeting. She added that Holliday is not obligated to appoint the person who was recommended by the panel.
The appointment would run through the end of this year. An election would be held in November to determine who would serve in 2016, the fourth and final year of Holleran’s term.
Holleran, an attorney who had been elected in 2012, announced in November that she was resigning from the school board because she was moving to Frankfort, where she had been working as a staff attorney in the Cabinet for Justice and Public Safety. At the time of her resignation, Holleran told the River City News that she finally decided that she could not live in Covington and commute daily to Frankfort.
She had been one of the leaders of the Westside Action Coalition, the neighborhood organization that represents residents of an area that’s bounded roughly by Russell Street on the east, I-71/75 on the west, Pike Street on the north and 15th Street on the south. She also had been active in Democratic politics.
Powers, who lives in the Helentown neighborhood, served one term on the board and opted not to seek re-election in 2012 for what she described as “personal and professional reasons.” Shortly before the election, Powers announced her support for the three candidates who wound up winning: Holleran, newcomer Joyce Baker, who had been a teacher and an administrator with the Covington schools for 36 years, and incumbent board member Glenda Huff.
Powers works as the development director for the Alzheimers Association of Greater Cincinnati.
Brumback, who is a retired Covington teacher, finished third last November in a three-way race for two board seats. Incumbents Julie Geisen Scheper and Jerry Avery were re-elected in what turned out to be a fairly close race for the second seat. Brumback wound up only 122 votes behind Avery.
Besides being a former teacher, she has been involved in a number of other enterprises in recent years. She was the founder of a lobbying group called Kentucky Women in Action and another organization called Capitol Education. She also owns Encore Events, which handles event planning.
Duesing is a Holmes High School graduate who studied at Northern Kentucky University, where he received his degree in 2001. He has worked as the director of operations for the Aronoff Center for the Arts in downtown Cincinnati since August of 2007.
April Frese Brockhoff lives in the Wallace Woods neighborhood and has four children in the Covington schools, where she is a member of the site-based council at Holmes High School. She majored in biology at the University of Cincinnati and needs to complete a couple of classes to receive her degree, she said.
Miller ran for the school board in 2012 during what became a heated campaign in which nine candidates battled for three seats on the board. Miller, who lives in the Austinburg neighborhood, was one of the candidates affiliated with Fix Covington Schools, an organization that was highly critical of the school board and a school system that routinely ranked near the bottom in student performance.
Miller finished sixth in the nine-way race. The Fix Covington Schools group was unsuccessful in getting any of its candidates elected.