Talawanda Board appoints new member to fill vacancy

At a special meeting Sept. 30, the Talawanda Board of Education selected Matthew Wyatt to fill a board vacancy following David Bothast's resignation Sept. 9.

Wyatt will serve out the remainder of Bothast's term, which was set to end in Jan. 2026. If Wyatt wants to stay on the board past that point, he will need to run in the 2025 election to retain the seat.

Wyatt, a senior director of development in Miami University's Farmer School of Business, moved from Kentucky to Oxford almost three years ago. He previously served on the Board of Education for Elizabethtown Independent Schools, a district roughly 40 miles south of Louisville, Kentucky.

The current board members reviewed applications from 16 people during a 40-minute executive session at 5 p.m. Sept. 30 before voting in a public session. During the public session, several participants spoke in favor of applicant Ivan Carver, who ran for a board position in 2023. Carver also spoke for himself, while no other applicants addressed the board during public participation.

Wyatt was appointed by a unanimous board vote and sworn in by Treasurer Shaunna Tafelski.

Board member Dawn King said during the meeting that her first choice was Carver, but she also highlighted Wyatt's decade of experience on a different board of education in Kentucky before voting in favor of Wyatt's appointment. Board member Pat Meade also highlighted Wyatt's previous experience in support of his appointment.

Howard said all 16 applicants were strong candidates. Each of them wrote in their applications that the teachers were the best part of the district, Howard added.

Who is Matthew Wyatt?

In Wyatt's current role as a senior director of development for Farmer, he works to connect alumni back to the university and raise money. He previously worked in a similar position at the University of Louisville and is also involved in the Rotary Club of Oxford.

Wyatt first got involved in the Elizabethtown Board of Education while his children were students, running for his seat in 2012. He served for nine years and six months before moving to Oxford. While the Elizabethtown schools were great at taking care of high-achieving students, Wyatt said, they struggled with students who needed more help, which was part of why he decided to run.

"My main focus was to correct that ... We raised revenue every year I was on the board, which was unprecedented at the time, and we put that money into not just building new facilities, but starting programs to really help the kids at the bottom," Wyatt said.

As a relative newcomer to the Talawanda School District, Wyatt said his outside perspective could be an asset to the board. Wyatt's own kids are no longer in school, but he said he believes strongly in the work that school boards do. Wyatt didn't expect to apply for a board position again, much less be selected, he said, but he would have regretted not stepping up with his level of experience after Bothast resigned.

"My spouse and I talked about it, and she was the first one to say, 'You know, you would be really good in that situation. You've dealt with a lot of conflicts ... and you handled it well, and you got what you wanted to accomplish accomplished,'" Wyatt said.

As he serves on the board for the next 15 months, Wyatt said he wants to apply his background in finances to dig into the district's current financial situation. Wyatt said he's especially interested in looking into how soon the district can return to a full busing schedule and whether the district's current revenue makes that feasible. The board cut busing to the state minimum in 2023 to save money after a levy failed to pass in 2022 and later voted to continue at the state minimum despite a property reappraisal that increased funding for the district.

As a board member in Elizabethtown, Wyatt said he regularly went door to door to talk to parents and held precinct meetings. He'd like to spend time connecting with Talawanda parents outside of board meetings to better understand the community, and he'll spend his next few weeks meeting district staff in each building to learn more about the district's operations.

"If you're going to raise taxes, if you're going to cut busing, if you're going to do these things that are controversial, then, darn it, you'd better not expect [people] just to show up to school board meetings," Wyatt said. He added that board members making tough decisions need to make intentional efforts to meet face-to-face with the voters they are accountable to.

The Talawanda Board of Education's next regular meeting, Wyatt's first with the district, is scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 17.