In an unusual move, the Brookfield-LaGrange Park District 95 Board of Education elected a new president last week, before the April election.
Usually, school boards wait until new members are seated in late April or May to reorganize themselves, but because the April 6 school board election in District 95 is uncontested — with only has three candidates for four spots — the school board decided to jump start the process.
In a special meeting following their regular March meeting, the school board elected Katie Mulcrone as its president, replacing Scott Encher, who decided not to run for another term on the school board and will be leaving the school board in May.
Encher had served as school board president for about a year after replacing Michelle Maggos, who resigned from the board last year.
Mulcrone has been on the school board for two years. Before being elected to the school board in 2019, Mulcrone served as president of the Brook Park Council for three years. She grew up in Riverside and has lived in Brookfield since 2004. Mulcrone is the national accounts manager for Dawson Sales Company, an industrial food broker. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1998.
Once the new board is seated, the school board will seek applications from those interested in filling the remaining open spot on the school board.
In his farewell comments to the school board, Encher praised his colleagues and teachers, and singled out Superintendent Mark Kuzniewski for special praise.
“When it comes to education and even outside of education you will be hard pressed to find a harder working man than our superintendent,” Encher said. “The work you have done, not just with the pandemic, but getting to know you through the referendum process, to have an almost $40 million construction project come in under budget, add air conditioning, have it come in on time, all the work that you have done.”
He also praised the district’s teachers and teachers’ union president Lynda Nadkarni.
“The heart and soul of any district are its teachers, and you have made my time here an absolute joy,” Encher said.
