Gary
Keon appointed by State Board of Education
Purdue University Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon has been tapped to join the new fiscal management board for the Gary Community School Corp.
The four-member volunteer board is tasked by law with advising a prospective emergency manager who will be responsible for returning the district to financial solvency.
Keon, who was appointed Wednesday by the State Board of Education, said he had a “broad understanding” of the district’s woes.
“It will be important to gather as much data as possible about the structure of the schools and the school system,” he said, “and then overlay that with what’s happening financially within the central administration.”
Keon has worked as the first head of the unified Purdue Northwest system since 2011.
He will join former state Sen. Earline Rogers, Calumet Township Trustee Clorius Lay and Indiana Department of Education official Lee Ann Kwiatkowski. Kwiatkowski is State School Superintendent Jennifer McCormick’s chief of staff
Each member will serve a four-year term, which starts when the person is appointed. The appointees do not receive a salary. Members of the school board are not eligible to serve on the advisory board.
The yet-to-be-named emergency manager will have fiscal and academic responsibility over the school district that’s mired in about $110 million of debt and is challenged by a shrinking enrollment base.
The Distressed Unit Appeals Board will have a public meeting at Wirt-Emerson at 6 p.m. Thursday where companies believed to be in serious running for that role will make presentations.
The board will not take public comments but will accept written ones after the meeting. State officials have declined to name the companies or give the number presenting to the public Thursday.
“At the meeting (Thursday), we will answer all of these questions,” commissioner Courtney Schaafsma said via email Wednesday. “The procurement process has its own set of rules that we are following.”
In May, the Robert Bobb Group LLC, which managed the troubled Detroit schools from 2011 to 2014, told the Post-Tribune it is at least one of the applicants being evaluated by the state Distressed Unit Appeals Board.
That application is joined by Indianapolis-based Phalen Leadership Academies, which manages the charter for Gary’s Thea Bowman Leadership Academy.
The Gary public school district has functioned for nearly two years with an emergency manager, Jack Martin, selected by the school board in 2015 from a list provided by the state.
Martin and the board have often butted heads over budget cuts that impacted staff and programs.
When appointed, Gary’s emergency manager will oversee finances and academics. The Gary School Board, which still meets once a month, will have no control over either. The superintendent would be reduced to an advisory role.
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