Update: Edward Panos has withdrawn from the race for the District 4 seat, according to Summit County Clerk Eve Furse.
Six candidates have declared their candidacy for a seat on the Park City Board of Education.
Two seats, in Districts 4 and 5, will be filled in the non-partisan election on Nov. 8, and the winners will serve a four-year term. The filing deadline was Friday.
Kara Hendrickson, the District 4 incumbent who has served on the board since January 2019, is not running for re-election. Four candidates — Josh Mann, Edward F. Panos, Mandy Pomeroy and Meredith M. Reed — are vying for the seat.
The top two vote-getters at a June 28 primary will advance to the November general election.
In District 5, Nick Hill is challenging incumbent Erin Grady for a spot on the board. Because there are only two candidates, no primary will be held.
An issue in the election is a one-week delay in enforcing a Summit County health order requiring mask-wearing that was scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1 at Parley’s Park Elementary School. Parents became concerned and started an online petition urging the district to implement the requirement.
In February, the Summit County Attorney Office’s released a report that concluded there was confusion from the start about the health order and that district and school officials did not intentionally delay enforcement of the mask mandate.
District 4 election
Mann, chief strategist for software company DTS Connex, has been a Jeremy Ranch resident for 12 years. He is critical of how the Parley’s Park mask mandate was handled.
“It seems like there was poor communication and poor process,” Mann said. “No matter how you feel about the masks, the School District should do its best to follow the law and I don’t think they achieved that at Parley’s Park.”
Communication overall needs to be improved, he added.
“I think the school board has a fractured relationship with teachers, parents and the local news,” Mann said. “Some teachers have been told not to contact school board members directly, that they should go through their union reps. I think our school board should hear directly from the teachers, as well as the union.”
Mann said he’s also heard from parents who think board members don’t listen to them.
In addition, he said district personnel have not spoken to KPCW since the fall. The radio station has reported that school board members said last fall they wouldn’t engage with KPCW until the Parley’s Park investigation was complete.
“We need ultimate transparency and if the school board isn’t willing to talk to the local radio station, that worries me very much,” Mann said.
Mann founded a citizen journalism website in 2013 called The Park Rag, which provides commentary on area events. He has two children who attend Jeremy Ranch Elementary School and has bachelor’s degree in business and psychology from the University of Kansas.
In 2018, he ran a write-in campaign in for a seat on the Summit County Council and got more than 1,100 votes but lost. Every incumbent was running unopposed and that didn’t seem right, Mann said.
Panos says he wants to help the school board communicate better with the community.
“I think that maybe the school board might be a little shy because they’ve been hammered in the past, but you still need to communicate with your people, with the community,” he said. “I think I can help out with that.”
Panos grew up in Sugar House and has lived in Park City for nine years. He has two daughters who attend Park City schools: one at Ecker Hill Middle School and one at Treasure Mountain Junior High.
“I try to commit my time to do my civic duty, and I think the school board hits close to home and I’d like to help out,” he said.
Panos said he volunteers at the Christian Center of Park City and the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Salt Lake City, sits on the Hellenic Committee for Greek Town and helps at the annual Greek Festival in Salt Lake City. He also led a campaign beginning in 2015 to raise about $50,000 to redo the restroom and showers at the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake, he said.
He attended the University of Montana, where he was studying organizational communications, but dropped out to help his family after his stepfather died. His company, Park City Finance, helps companies find debt financing.
In 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Panos with defrauding investors by creating shell companies and selling them to private entities after orchestrating paid promotional campaigns to artificially increase the price of shares. He settled the case without admitting or denying the allegations by paying about $3.2 million in civil penalties.
Panos said he got involved with a company that had a bad CEO “and we got caught up in the whole thing.”
“The smart thing to do was to settle with them and move on,” he said.
Pomeroy — who has a bachelor’s degree and a multiple subject teaching credential with a crosscultural, language and academic development emphasis from Santa Clara University — was an elementary school teacher for eight years in California’s Sunnyvale School District and was named teacher of the year in 2008. Two of her daughters attend Jeremy Ranch Elementary School and her third daughter goes to Ecker Hill Middle School.
Since moving to Park City in 2013, Pomeroy has been involved in volunteer activities, including serving as a board member of the Park City Education Foundation and chair of the organization’s Red Apple Gala fundraising event. She also has been a Girl Scout troop leader and is president of the Jeremy Ranch parent-teacher organization.
As PTO president, she has a good understanding of the district’s needs and wants to help the schools any way she can, Pomeroy said. She also said her multifaceted educational experience is a plus and that she wants to put it to work for the district’s children.
Pomeroy, who worked for Grand Canyon University for two years as an account executive and recruiter, recently stopped working full time. She now does substitute teaching when needed and works two days a week at Park City Mountain Resort.
The reduction in hours allows her to devote more time to causes that she feels passionate about, Pomeroy said. At the top of the list is education administration, she said.
“I can bring a unique insight onto the board,” she said.
Reed, a Realtor and project management professional, said her work on programs for th
e Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs and more than 20 years of experience leading teams and providing strategic communication support give her skills to meet the district’s challenges.
“As a member of the board of education, I will listen to our educators, students, and parents to make sure we are achieving the goals established in the strategic plan,” she said in a written release.
In addition, her strength in building consensus among groups with disparate approaches and opinions would be an asset to the board, according to Reed. She said her master’s degree in divinity from Vanderbilt University and service as an Air Force chaplain honed her listening skills and developed her intuitive abilities.
“In our community, we all have a common goal: providing an excellent educational experience to every student,” Reed said in the release. “But we’ve suffered from an inability to navigate complex situations from different perspectives, and then providing effective transparent communication to stakeholders.”
Reed, who has lived in Park City for seven years, is a former chair of the Summit County Democratic Party and is the post commander for the Park City American Legion Post 14. She has served as a member of the board for the Salt Lake League of Women Voters and was a national board member for the serving spouse advisory council for the Military Officers Association of America.
Her four children — a senior at Park City High School and three children at Jeremy Ranch Elementary School — inspired her in part to run, Reed said.
District 5 election
Grady, who has served as a co-president of the parent-teacher association at Parley’s Park, was selected by the board in November 2017 to fill a vacancy created by the departure of Julie Eihausen. She ran unopposed for the seat in 2018 and during her tenure, she has served as the board’s vice president and recently began her second year as president.
“I really want to continue the positive work that the board has been pushing forward and to be a part of that team,” Grady said. “I would love to see the master plan through fruition.”
In November, voters passed a $79.2 million general obligation bond that is helping to fund new construction and renovation at district schools. The overall cost of the facilities upgrades, which are the result of a yearslong master planning process, is $129 million, with the remainder of the money coming from real property leases.
She also wants to continue to focus on providing “an equitable education and a healthy learning environment” for everyone, said Grady, who also serves on the board of PC READS, a nonprofit that provides support and resources to dyslexic students.
When asked by The Park Record for a response to the criticism about the implementation of the mask mandate, Grady said, “The county attorney put out a statement and I think it stands for itself.”
Grady grew up in Park City and graduated from Park City High School, then earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Utah.
She worked at Deer Valley Resort’s public relations department for 13 years before stepping down to become a stay-at-home mom. She has two children, one a student at Parley’s Park and the other a student at Ecker Middle School.
Hill, a senior product manager for Willis Towers Watson, a multinational professional services company, said he’s running because of questionable actions by the board, including those that affected the health and safety of the whole community.
Hill cited the delay in enforcing the mask mandate at Parley’s Park, where his son, who is immunocompromised, is a student. The COVID-19 pandemic had been ongoing for a year and a half by that time and it “was astonishing to me that they didn’t have a plan ready to go as soon as case rates when up,” he said.
When issues arise, the response from school board members has been to close themselves off from public comments and accountability as much as possible, Hill said.
“Essentially, they’re operating in an echo chamber now,” he said. “They’re not listening to teachers. They’re not listening to school staff and they’re not listening to the wider community. I think it’s really important that we have new voices and new ideas on the school board.”
He said another factor in his decision to run is a desire to support educators, who he said are the target of state and national efforts to prevent them from being able to do their jobs.
“I think that it is imperative that at the local level we do everything we can to protect our teachers from that and try to find ways that our teachers can freely do their jobs without fear of being accused of teaching divisive things,” Hill said.
Hill, who has lived in Park City since 2015, earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in sport and exercise science at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom and a master’s degree in organizational leadership from the University of Colorado Boulder.