Clarence Board of Education·September 14, 2026
Policy 7134 Adopted in One Reading · A Turf Warning · Enrollment Holds at 4,089 · Board Goals Wait a Month
A board that normally reads a policy twice before adopting it read this one once. With a New York State certification deadline of September 21 falling before the trustees meet again, all seven members voted to adopt Policy 7134, Safeguarding the Rights of Immigrant Students — four pages barring school staff from letting immigration agents into non-public areas without a federal judicial warrant, from asking about a family’s immigration status, and from releasing a child on a civil detainer. Trustee Dawn Snyder voted yes and asked for follow-up talks on how the district would actually execute one clause: keeping a student safely at school if a parent is detained. Elsewhere in a 44-minute session, an environmental lawyer with a fifth-grader at Sheridan Hill asked the board to replace Clarence’s artificial turf fields with grass when they reach the end of their life; Superintendent Dr. Matthew Frahm reported enrollment essentially flat at 4,089 and a summer surge in English-as-a-New-Language needs that put a full-time ENL teacher back on the payroll; and the board took up draft 2026–27 goals that would set a timeline for the district’s next capital project — and a future public vote — while the current one is still being built. Five finance items, sixteen personnel items and two special-education reports passed on four unanimous voice votes. The goals themselves were not adopted; trustees will email edits and take them up next month.
The Clarence school board has a settled way of doing policy: the policy committee meets, the full board hears a first read, and a second read and adoption follow at a later meeting. On Monday night the board did it in one sitting, and Superintendent Dr. Matthew Frahm[*] said plainly why. New York’s budget bill last spring wrote into law a set of requirements for how districts handle immigrant students, and it attached a certification: districts must log into a state portal and attest the pieces are in place. The deadline is September 21. The board’s next meeting is after it.
“It’s on a quicker track than usual,” Frahm told the board, adding that the information “came out over the summer months between our meetings” and that “the timeline and process that the state had used didn’t allow us to follow our usual policy and procedure.” The agenda still carries the item as First Read — Policy 7134; the type column beside it says Action. That contradiction is the whole story of the evening’s one policy vote. Read the Policy Explainer: what Policy 7134 says, provision by provision, where it came from, and the questions it raises →
The language itself is not homegrown. Clarence subscribes to the policy service run by Erie 1 BOCES, and Frahm said its legal team drafted the recommended text, which “largely reflects the legal language that was included in the budget bill.” Asked directly by the board whether the policy simply follows the state requirements, he said it does, “and is based on the recommendation from the Erie 1 legal team.”
What the four pages actually do is concrete. School personnel are barred from using district resources for immigration enforcement; from asking about or recording a student’s or family’s citizenship, nationality or country of origin; from disclosing that information to an immigration authority; and from treating immigration status as directory information. They may not delay or deny enrollment because a family cannot immediately produce documents. Non-public areas of school property are closed to immigration authorities unless they present a federal judicial search or arrest warrant signed by a U.S. District Court or magistrate judge — civil immigration warrants, administrative detainers and notices to appear expressly do not qualify. Staff may not hand a student over to an immigration authority because a parent has been detained. The district’s designated Immigrant Student Rights Liaison is the superintendent himself, listed by name, office address and email in the policy text.
The one clause that drew comment is the last one. In the event a parent or guardian is detained and no one comes for the child, the policy says the district will “keep the student safely on school premises” and will not call the statewide child-abuse register until every other authorized emergency contact has been tried. Trustee Dawn Snyder flagged it before the vote: “I’m good with approving this policy, but I do want to have some further discussion… so everybody is on the same page.” There is, she noted, a difference between adopting a sentence and having a procedure for it.
Frahm pointed back to internal guidance the district built roughly a year and a half ago off a New York State advisory document — work done with the leadership team “so that they have a shared understanding of how things would be handled,” and, he said, never yet needed. “We do not have knowledge in our corner of the world that there has been any inappropriate contact,” he said of local law enforcement, which he described as respectful of schools. He accepted Snyder’s point anyway: the district will make sure the understanding is “shared and consistent.”
The motion came from Trustee Dennis Priore[*], seconded by Trustee Adrienne Costello-Sulik, and carried on a unanimous voice vote of all seven trustees. Beyond the vote, Frahm told the board his remaining work is administrative: file the state certification, and square the district’s internal documents and website content with what the law now requires.
School boards adopt policy in two passes. A first read is a presentation: the committee brings language to the full board, trustees ask questions, nobody is bound. A second read at a later meeting is where the board actually adopts it. The gap between them is the point — it gives trustees and the public time to notice a problem before the language becomes district law.
Clarence collapsed both passes into one on September 14 for a reason a reader can check: New York required districts to certify compliance through a state portal by September 21, and the board’s next meeting falls after that date. So this policy got a single reading and an immediate vote.
What that means practically: Policy 7134 is fully in force now, exactly as adopted, with no second look built into the calendar. Any refinement — including the procedural detail Trustee Snyder asked for — has to come back as an amendment on a future agenda, not as part of a pending second read.
One person signed up to speak, and she came with handouts. Jill Witkowski-Heaps[*] of 5984 Corinne Lane[*] introduced herself as a public-interest environmental lawyer whose specialty is PFAS — the “forever chemicals” — and then explained, disarmingly, what had actually brought her to a school board meeting: she has a fifth-grade son at Sheridan Hill who is “now an aspiring soccer goalie.”
Her argument turned on a calendar. Clarence’s artificial turf fields went in during December 2016; such fields have a useful life of eight to ten years; so the district is approaching the moment when it decides whether to lay down more turf or go back to grass. She asked the board to choose grass, and laid out why: crumb rubber infill containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, lead and phthalates; synthetic grass blades manufactured with PFAS; a May 2025 position statement from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai recommending against artificial turf on chemical and heat grounds; and a 2024 study she attributed to researcher Kyla Bennett[*] finding PFAS on the skin of players and coaches rose after games on turf but not after games on grass.
The detail she led with was the goalies. A Washington State soccer coach, she said, began keeping a list in 2016 of young athletes with cancers — mostly lymphoma and leukemia — and over three years the list reached 268 names, all of whom had played on artificial turf. Sixty percent of the soccer players on that list were goalies, she said, though goalies are only ten percent of soccer players. She added a non-chemical number: a 58 percent higher injury risk for high school athletes on turf than on grass, and noted that professional football and soccer players are now demanding natural surfaces.
“As a school board, you’re in charge of a key decision here,” she told the trustees, and asked them to do the research before it arrives. She handed up printed copies of the studies. President Boglioli thanked her and had the packet passed to the board. No trustee responded on the record, and no turf item was on Monday’s agenda — which was precisely her point. Public comment closed with no other speakers.
The district’s September headcount is 4,089 — four more than last September, seven fewer than two Septembers ago. Frahm framed that as consistent with a projected slight increase over the next three to five years, and noted the more consequential movement is inside the total: Harris Hill is up 25 students year over year to 476, Ledgeview up 11 to 493, while Clarence Center is down nine to 419 and the middle school down eight to 914. The high school sits at 1,260. The district folds the Town of Clarence’s annual development presentation into the projection, and Frahm was candid about the comparison that makes flat enrollment look good: “when we look across the state,” he said, the story elsewhere is “declining enrollment.”
The real shift was in English as a New Language. Over the summer the district logged 74 registrations from students with another language at home, 28 different languages among new families, and 20 students who qualified for ENL services. That mattered because the district had deliberately left an ENL position unfilled in the spring, when the programming did not appear to need it. It does now. Buried in the personnel slate the board approved Monday is Michaela Farley, a probationary appointment in the ENL tenure area at $50,000, TESOL certification pending — a full-time ENL provider back on the books, filling the line vacated by Claire Guary, who moved to another position in the district.
The rest of the opening report was the machinery of a school year that worked. Transportation moves roughly 5,000 students to 50 separate locations daily — a figure Frahm offered against the assumption that most families drive — while expanded out-of-zone runs to daycare providers, a change requested by parents at a board meeting more than a year ago, went, per the department, “really, really smoothly.” Familiarity with the routing software has cut the district’s need for contracted runs and let it take back positions previously outsourced. Twenty-eight new faculty members came through a three-day orientation, about half on probationary track and half in long-term or regular substitute roles; the district’s annual mini conference offered 105 sessions. Trustee Snyder relayed what new Ledgeview staff had told her: in all their years of teaching, “they’ve never felt more prepared and ready for a school year to start.”
On safety, Frahm welcomed Officer Ron Jentz[*], the new school resource officer at the middle school, and said the district has recommended a fourth SRO to the town for the high school — an appointment it expects the town to make on September 23. He also said Clarence expects to be among a handful of districts recognized statewide for its unified Special Olympics programming, with a press release to follow.
The visible summer work is largely done. The Harris Hill playground — a replacement for a long-serving structure that had, as Frahm put it, “well lived its expectations” — opened with a student-run ribbon cutting on the first day of school, September 8; Vice President Tricia Andrews and Trustee Michael Fuchs attended. Both front lots at the middle school were torn up and reconfigured into a queuing system designed to pull afternoon pickup traffic off Greiner Road[*], and Frahm reported it is doing exactly that: the auditorium loop and front bus loop absorb the 3:00-to-3:30 crush.
The high school is the patience item. The eastern half of the front lot was rebuilt this summer; the western half comes next summer, and only then does the traffic flow change. Until then, Frahm said, people will notice more parking and no difference at all to Main Street traffic — “about a year from now” was his answer to when the high school feels the benefit. Window and door replacements and masonry work finished on schedule, and the district’s energy performance contract switched over the night of the meeting, starting at Clarence Center Elementary and moving to the middle school, with LED lighting targeted district-wide by late winter or early spring.
Which brings up the item with the longest horizon. Among the draft 2026–27 board goals presented Monday is “Safe and Effective Learning Environments,” and its action step is explicit: establish a timeline for bringing a capital project proposal to the community for consideration and a future public vote. The board toured all four elementary schools last year and produced a document ranking capital needs by urgency; it tours the middle and high schools in October. “We’re right in the middle of a current capital project,” Frahm acknowledged, “but we want to make sure that we are forward-thinking.”
The other two draft goals: expanded learning experiences, built around a career-exploration program for high school students connected to local businesses and alumni; and leveraging artificial intelligence for future-ready learning, which this year shifts emphasis from training adults to teaching students. That last one sits downstream of Policy 5840, the AI policy the board adopted July 13.
The goals were informational only. No motion was made. Boglioli asked trustees to review the language and send edits to Frahm by email before the next meeting, “and we can look at adopting them at the next meeting.”
A school district cannot simply decide to rebuild a building. Major capital work in New York is financed with borrowing, and borrowing requires a public referendum — district voters approve or reject the project at the polls, separately from the annual budget vote.
The state then pays back a share through building aid, which is why projects are designed around what qualifies and why state approvals gate the schedule. It is also why a board starts talking about the next project years before asking for it: building a needs list, ranking it, scoping it to what aid and the tax levy will bear, then putting it to a vote.
So when a board goal says “establish a timeline for bringing a capital project proposal to the community,” read it as the opening move of a process that ends at a ballot box — not a decision to build anything. Nothing has been scoped, priced or scheduled.
Business official Dr. Patricia Grupka[*] ran the finance block in under a minute, which is roughly how long it took the board to approve all five items together. F-1 and F-2 were the July financials and the month’s bills: three check warrants dated July 8, 15 and 29, covering 135 transactions and $1,649,665, reviewed by the district’s internal claims auditor before they reached the board. The general fund’s adjusted budget stands at $101.1 million after $291,620 in July adjustments, with $3.81 million spent and $44.86 million encumbered in the first month of the fiscal year.
F-3 approved the fall and winter community education instructor stipend list — youth flag football and basketball, adult lap swim, dot mandala painting, and three unpaid retirement-planning seminars. F-4 was the technical one: a resolution authorizing a four-BOCES collaborative to negotiate student-data-privacy agreements on the district’s behalf. And F-5 retained a law firm for property-tax litigation.
That last item has a name and an address attached. The agenda packet includes a September 10 engagement letter from Gross Shuman P.C.[*] of Buffalo, signed by member attorney John K. Rottaris[*], retaining the firm at $300 an hour — a discount off standard rates, the letter says — to represent Clarence in Wilson Greatbatch Ltd. v. Town of Amherst, Index No. 814875-2026, a tax-assessment challenge to property at 10000 Wehrle Drive in Clarence. School districts do not set assessments, but they are very much affected by them, which is why they hire their own counsel to sit in.
School boards vote in blocks. Monday’s five finance items moved as a single motion; so did ten instructional personnel items, five non-instructional ones, and both special-education reports. A block vote is not a shortcut around scrutiny — the chair asks for questions on the whole range first, and any trustee can pull an item out.
Watch the difference between Action and Informational in the agenda’s right-hand column. Informational items are put before the board to be seen, not voted on. That distinction was audible Monday: when the chair moved to approve “P1 through P11,” Trustee Snyder interjected — “minus P6.” P6 is a tenure notification, informational only. The motion was restated as P1–P5 and P7–P11.
A tax certiorari proceeding is a property owner’s court challenge to a town’s assessment of its property. The town defends the assessment; the owner argues it is too high.
The school district is not the assessor, but school taxes are levied against that assessment — so if the assessment drops, the district collects less, and if it drops retroactively, the district may owe refunds on taxes it has already spent. That exposure is why Clarence retains its own counsel in selected cases rather than leaving the defense entirely to the town.
BOCES — Boards of Cooperative Educational Services — are regional bodies that let districts buy jointly what none could afford alone: special-education programs, career and technical education, legal and policy services, data processing. Clarence’s BOCES lines run through this month’s budget report in the millions.
The F-4 resolution joins a newer function. Four BOCES upstate built a shared Risk Operations Center that negotiates data-privacy agreements with the software vendors districts use, so each district isn’t separately bargaining with every ed-tech company over Education Law 2-d — New York’s student-data-privacy statute and its Part 121 rules.
The resolution authorizes Clarence to use those pre-negotiated agreements. It reserves the district’s right to decide which tools it uses and to have its own lawyers review any agreement before signing, and it spends no money beyond what is budgeted.
The policy shelf came into this meeting clean. Every measure pending at the July 13 reorganization — all eleven second-read policies, including Policy 5840 on artificial intelligence — was adopted that night. On August 24 the board adopted the district-wide and building-level safety plans on the schedule it had promised in July, and re-approved its Code of Conduct unchanged. None of those required further action on September 14, and none appeared on this agenda. Policy 7134 is therefore the first new policy the board has taken up since July, and it arrived and departed in a single night.
The one item the August brief flagged as carried forward was procedural, and it closed on schedule. Item P7 on August 24 noticed the tenure recommendation of Janine Sclavunos in the Business tenure area — informational only, with the packet stating that no action would be taken until the September 14 meeting. On September 14 the board approved it, effective September 26. In its place comes the next one: item P6 this month notices Nicolette Bekric, Social Worker, tenure date October 9, informational only, with no action to be taken until the October 26 meeting. That is the cycle working exactly as documented.
Three August items from the facilities side did not resolve so cleanly, and two are worth stating plainly. The thermal incident at the high school — the interior-welding event reported on August 24, remediated with negative air machines, with a section of roof deck slated to be cut out and replaced — did not appear on this agenda and was not mentioned in any report. Nothing in Monday’s record says the roof-deck work is complete, incomplete or scheduled. Likewise, the full status and financial review that Buffalo Construction was to deliver to the whole board in October did not appear Monday; it is not yet due. The third, the energy performance contract, did advance: on August 24 the district reported state-approval delays pushing completion to August 2027 with work running on second shift; on September 14 Frahm reported the EPC switchover officially beginning at Clarence Center, moving next to the middle school, with LED replacement district-wide targeted for late winter or early spring. No revised completion date was given.
What this meeting leaves pending for next month: the draft 2026–27 Board of Education goals, presented as information with edits due to the superintendent by email and adoption expected at the next meeting; the Bekric tenure notification, for October 26; the board’s facilities tour of the middle and high schools, set for October; and — formally on no one’s agenda, but now in the record — the artificial turf fields.
Julia Jobes[*], sworn in as the board’s ex-officio student member on August 24, delivered her first report of the year. Students returned September 8; seniors marked it with the annual sunrise, and student council is deep in homecoming planning — spirit days, hallway decorating, the Friday rally and the weekend dance. The traditional homecoming court has been approved for reintroduction, she said, “but with a clear student-led selection process centered on school leadership character and inclusivity.” High school musicians played the town’s Labor Day Parade and the band boosters ran concessions at the Clarence Arts and Crafts Festival; chorale auditions and instrumental lessons are underway across all buildings. Fall sports are running from football to cross country to girls swim and dive, with the district aiming to hold its state athletic association School of Distinction status; she congratulated the high school wrestling coach on an ECIC Division I sportsmanship award. Social studies classes marked the 25th anniversary of September 11, and the high school hosts a 12-hour walk at the track this Sunday for mental-health awareness and suicide prevention.
Frahm opened his own report on the same anniversary, thanking two teachers — Ryan Cooley and a colleague[*] — for opening their classrooms to news coverage of how they teach the day. He also gave the evening its driest moment. The Buffalo News had interviewed him about the district’s balancing of instructional technology against screen-time concerns, a theme the district calls “progress with purpose” and which appears in the strategic plan as a formal action step. The paper interviewed two superintendents, he noted, “and they put a big picture of the other one up on the front. So I’ve always been told I’ve got a face for radio, and they certainly agreed with that one.” On artificial intelligence, where the district convened some 25 staff last year to set beliefs and approve platforms, he was more sober: “It’s a rough week for the field of AI… we know that there are challenges in front of us.”
In announcements, the education foundation’s community carnival runs September 26, 9 to 11:30 a.m., inside and outside the high school gym, free but for concessions. Vice President Andrews reported from the Erie County Association of School Boards delegate assembly: a fall board-networking session October 15, the school boards association convention October 22–24[*], and a legislative dessert forum November 19. Williamsville, she added, is bringing author Tony Frontier — whose book AI with Intention anchored that district’s opening day — to speak on December 2, and will invite Clarence board members. There was no correspondence and no unfinished business.
All seven trustees were present — Boglioli, Andrews, Costello-Sulik, Fuchs, Magera, Priore and Snyder — a full board. Julia Jobes sat as the ex-officio student member and does not vote; she is not counted in any tally below. The board votes by voice (“All those in favor? Aye”), so individual positions are not recorded; every motion carried unanimously. No recusals were noted. Movers and seconders are taken from the chair’s thank-yous in the audio.
Agenda item B2, listed as “First Read — Policy 7134” but typed as an Action item. The board adopted the four-page policy outright rather than carrying it to a second read, because New York State requires districts to certify compliance through a state portal by September 21 — before the board’s next meeting. Language was drafted by the Erie 1 BOCES policy service’s legal team and, per the superintendent, largely tracks the statutory language enacted in the spring state budget. The policy designates the Superintendent of Schools as the district’s Immigrant Student Rights Liaison; bars staff from using district resources for immigration enforcement, from inquiring about or disclosing immigration status, and from designating status as directory information; bars access to non-public school areas by immigration authorities absent a federal judicial warrant; bars release of a student on a civil detainer; and requires the district to keep a student safely on premises if a parent or guardian is detained. Trustee Snyder supported adoption while asking for follow-up discussion on district procedure for that final provision. Next steps stated on the record: file the state certification, and align internal documents and website content with the requirement.
Policy Explainer: a plain-language guide to what Policy 7134 says, where it came from, and the questions it raises — Policy #7134, explained.
One motion carried all five: July 1–31 financial reports (F1); the July bills and check warrant — three warrants dated July 8, 15 and 29, 135 transactions totaling $1,649,665.14, reviewed by the internal claims auditor (F2); the Fall/Winter 2026 community education instructor and stipend list (F3); a resolution authorizing the RIC ONE Risk Operations Center — an Article 5 General Municipal Law collaborative of four upstate BOCES — and its attorneys to negotiate Education Law 2-d data privacy agreements with vendors on the district’s behalf for 2026–27, reserving Clarence’s right to choose its own tools and to have its own counsel review any agreement, at no cost beyond budget (F4); and retention of Gross Shuman P.C.[*] at $300/hour to represent the district in selected tax certiorari cases, per a September 10 engagement letter covering Wilson Greatbatch Ltd. v. Town of Amherst, Index No. 814875-2026, property at 10000 Wehrle Drive, Clarence (F5). No questions were asked on F1–F5.
Amendments to the professional-development opening sessions (P1); two instructional resignations — a high school foreign language teacher and a Ledgeview reading teacher (P2); one unpaid childcare leave request, a Ledgeview first-grade teacher for 2026–27 (P3); five prior appointments approved by the superintendent, including probationary appointments in Spanish, ENL and Speech and one regular substitute in Speech (P4); appointments including a probationary school social worker, student leadership coordinators, fall drama and fall sports extracurriculars, the 2026–27 mentor list of 37 pairings at $2,200 per full-year mentorship, and MTSS Tier 1 screening by three retired Clarence teachers at $45/hour (P5); tenure appointment of Janine Sclavunos, Business, effective September 26 (P7); curriculum writing projects at $30/hour (P8); presentation compensation at $20/hour (P9); three building-based substitutes (P10); and 21 additions to the substitute teacher list, which HR put at about 207 names (P11). P6 was excluded from the motion at Trustee Snyder’s prompting — “minus P6, that’s information” — because it is a tenure notification for action at a later meeting.
Six resignations — three teacher aides, a bus driver, a registered professional nurse and a cleaner (P12); two changes in status, a part-time clerk typist reassigned to Student Support Services with hours raised from 15 to 19.5 per week, and a teacher aide reassigned to school monitor at the high school (P13); ten prior appointments approved by the superintendent, including nine teacher aides at $16.50–$17.50/hour hired before the doors opened and a temporary district-wide float nurse at $30.75/hour (P14); appointments including two lifeguards and a senior clerk typist at Sheridan Hill starting October 7 (P15); and substitute-list changes across the bus driver, cleaner, nurse and teacher aide/monitor categories (P16).
The Committee on Special Education met for 13 days and recommended services for 22 students; the Committee on Preschool Special Education met one day and recommended services for three. Twenty-five students in all.
Roll call confirmed a full board — “I believe we’re all here.” Moved and carried without discussion.
No comments or questions were raised.
Carried after the chair noted the committee schedule and upcoming events in the board packet. The meeting ran 44 minutes from gavel to adjournment.
Presented without a vote: agenda item B1, the draft 2026–27 Board of Education goals (informational; edits due to the superintendent by email, adoption expected at the next meeting), and agenda item P6, notification of the tenure recommendation for Nicolette Bekric, Social Worker, tenure date October 9 — no action until the October 26 meeting.
This brief covers the full public session, captured complete from the district’s YouTube stream: 53.7 minutes of audio containing 44 minutes of meeting, from the call to order through adjournment. The capture tool exited with a non-zero status and left a stray partial fragment on disk, but nothing in the record is missing — the gavel and the adjournment are both on the recording. No executive session was held and none was noticed.
Proper nouns were resolved against the official 108-page agenda packet and the district’s verified roster, which govern spellings. Corrections applied from audio: “Bogg-Lily,” “Baglioli,” “Bacchalilli” and “Bogdali” are James Boglioli; “Dr. Frame” and “Dr. Prang” are Dr. Matthew Frahm; “Dr. Grubka” and “Dr. Gruffka” are Dr. Patricia Grupka; “Mr. Michele” is Robert Michel; “Trisha” is Tricia Andrews; “Julia Joves” is Julia Jobes; “Ms. Shuska” is Jill Snuszka, who is listed among district administration in the agenda packet — this resolves the special-education presenter left unattributed in the August 24 brief, though her exact title does not appear in the packet; “Grove Schuman” is Gross Shuman P.C.; “Dr. Overholt” is Kristin Overholt, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction; “Kate Green” is Kate Greene; “Mr. Lembeck” is Jason Lehmbeck; and “Kim McLaren” is Kim McClaren.
Street validation was run against the Town of Clarence street inventory. It returned one candidate, and the correction was applied: the public speaker’s address, heard as “Corrine Lane,” is Corinne Lane. The transcript’s “Grindr” is Greiner Road, a correction already confirmed on August 24. The one specific property in the evening’s record — 10000 Wehrle Drive, the parcel in the tax-assessment case — was checked against this publication’s address database; the database was not reachable from this workstation, and a tax-assessment proceeding carries no dispatch-history relevance in any event.
Names that appear only in audio and not in any official document carry the [*] flag and should be verified before they are quoted anywhere that matters: the public speaker and the researcher she cited, the visiting Erie County Association of School Boards representative, the new school resource officer, the second teacher thanked for the September 11 lessons, and the October convention’s sponsoring association, which the audio renders ambiguously. Several district administrators named only in audio were resolved against the agenda packet’s own participant lists, as noted above. Board of Education votes are voice votes; individual positions are not recorded and no recusals were noted. The board’s student member is ex-officio and non-voting, and is excluded from every tally in this brief.