Keys School Board no longer all-male

The Monroe County School Board will cease being a five-man panel next week as it welcomes the first woman elected in six years, Mindy Conn.

The board meets Tuesday at the A. J. Henriquez Administrative Complex, 241 Trumbo Road in Key West, starting with an organizational meeting at 3 p.m., during which veteran Andy Griffiths and newcomer Conn will be sworn-in and the board will elect a chairman and vice chairman.

Griffiths was reelected without opposition while Conn defeated the incumbent, Ed Davidson, in the Aug. 30 primary in her first bid for office.

A workshop is set for 3:30 p.m. and the regular meeting for 5 p.m.

Conn, a former New York attorney turned parent of two living on Sugarloaf Key, will join board members Griffiths, John Dick, Bobby Highsmith and Ron Martin. The last woman on the board was Debra Walker, who, after serving 16 years, was defeated by Ron Martin in 2010.

Agenda items Tuesday include:

▪ A report on chronic absenteeism research and strategies by former Horace O’Bryant School Principal Mike Henriquez, who this year was reassigned as coordinator of alternative education after an HOB day-care scandal in which $21,000 in cash went missing.

▪ Superintendent Mark Porter’s presentation on a proposal to create a middle charter school called the Somerset Key West Collegiate Academy Middle School, modeled after a Miami-Dade school. The school would be located at Florida Keys Community College on Stock Island along with its sister school, Somerset Key West Collegiate Academy, a high school.

“A focus of our school is to partner with Gerald Adams Elementary in order to provide a middle school option for the children who live on the same island as our campus as well as students currently being bused in from Bahama Village,” reads the application. “The goal is to represent the demographic makeup of our Key West community and reflect a racial/ethnic range of the other local public middle schools.”