The recent news that Super Bowl organizing committee president and CEO Bill Lively will be taking over leadership of the Dallas Symphony June 1 will impact DISD: Lively, who had planned to run for trustee Jack Lowe’s position when Lowe steps down in May, says he can’t do the Symphony job and serve as a trustee. So Lively’s race is over before it began.
“I’m frustrated by it,” Lively said about his inability to run for the DISD job, “but I can’t take it on right now.” Instead, Lively said that he’s working with DISD administrators to come up with a task within the district that he can work into his schedule.
Lively’s decision leaves, at the moment, three Lakewood-East Dallas residents who are likely candidates for the trustee job: Bob Weiss, Vince Murchison and Mike Morath. (No word from anyone elsewhere planning to run in District 2, which stretches from Hillcrest and North Dallas to near Woodrow Wilson high schools. Woodrow Wilson is in Bernadette Nutall’s District 9, even though a good portion of the attendance zone for those schools is in District 2.)
We wrote about Weiss’ interest several months ago; he’s a former City Plan Commission member and current chair of the board at Paul Quinn College through his job at the Meadows Foundation. We also mentioned Vince Murchison’s interest at that time; Murchison is a lawyer and head of Long’s SBDM, and he’s more likely to be found attending DISD board and committee meetings than anyone I know short of the trustees themselves.
The third potential candidate, Mike Morath, says he is retiring from a company he founded and is selling (MinuteMenu.com), and he would like to work “full time for the next 10 years” as a DISD board member. Morath grew up in Garland, graduated from that school’s International Baccalaureate program (a program Woodrow is in the final stages of implementing), and is a member of the Woodrow Wilson High School Community Foundation board of directors.
We’ll keep you updated as plans for the May election develop.
