D127’s Board of Education to Welcome Two New Members

Ken Witkowski and Edwin Brown will be two new members to following the April 5 elections. Five candidates competed for four open seats on the seven-member board. The two incumbent candidates continuing their roles on the board are Ann Dingman and Jon Cokefair.

Dingman received the highest number of votes with 1,996 votes. Witkowski received 1,754 votes. Cokefair received 1,752 votes. Nerge was defeated with 1,642 votes.

“I’m excited to be able to work with all the wonderful people I get to work with at District 127,” said Dingman. “I look forward to finding ways to continue to improve our students’ opportunities.”

Dingman was appointed to a vacancy on the board in 2004, elected to the board for a four-year term of office in April 2005 and re-elected in April 2009 to a two-year term office.

She said she’s also looking forward to working with the board’s two new members but also thoroughly enjoyed working with Nerge. “He did a wonderful job,” she said.

Brown said he looks forward to serving the board and community in his new role and he hopes to bring more transparency to board meetings. “A little more clarity when things are presented on the board,” he said in regard to what he will push for when decisions are made.

Brown is a 22-year resident of Grayslake. He has three children, all of which have completed or are going through the Grayslake school system.

Cokefair will be entering his second term on the board.

“I’m very excited to be re-elected,” he said. “Just continuing all the work we’ve done in the past and working with the newly elected board,” he said about what he looks forward to in the coming term.  

Witkowski said in a previous Patch article that aside from improving the district’s ranking in the state he is interested in surveying graduates as another measure of the success of the education the district provides. “I want to know that, say four years down the road, our students have been well served by our system. What did we do well? Where did we fall short?”

These seats serve four-year terms, expiring in April 2015. The results posted on the Lake County Clerk’s Web site are not official and do not include provisional ballots nor late arriving vote by mail ballots.

Low Voter Turnout

The Lake County Clerk’s Web site reported a 14.98 percent voter turnout with 60,787 ballots cast out of 405,690 registered voters.