Thom Hulme (Place 4)
“Introduce yourself, do you have any children attending ISD in Coppell, why are you running for this office?”
“Good evening everybody I’m Thom Hulme. I certainly appreciate your time as well this evening. I’ve been married to Kelly my wife for 23 years, we’ve been a resident of Coppell for that same period of time. My daughter, Marin, graduated a year and a half ago, getting close to two years. She’s a second semester sophomore at Baylor, doing very well. I have two older sons and they’re both married and live in Cleveland, Ohio and Cleveland, South Carolina. They’ve always been best friends. They were Eagle Scouts as well. Great kids. I’m very blessed with a family that supports me to do this. I know what the time commitment is, I have served on your school Board for the last nine years as a Trustee, and prior to that was very involved with Town Center Elementary and North Middle School, going through and serving with their PTOs as well. As far as experience, I think that’s my major reason for running, that we are having new folks come on to the school Board, and it helps to have continuity, that is invaluable. If it weren’t for [former Board President] Cindy Warner in my case and [former Board member] Scott Orr, some of my predecessors, and doing the mentorship that they did with me to make me a good Trustee, a valuable trustee I think, that I would have quit long ago. I’d like to continue my service for this community. I value this community very much, I love this community as a matter of fact. I would be honored if you would continue to use me and have my services employed to support this community as a school Board Trustee.
“Can you tell us about the organizations who are endorsing your campaign and approximately how many CISD Board meetings you’ve attended in the past?”
“Thank you for the question, I would have to say a lot. I haven’t sought any endorsements from any specific group, I think it’s important that I work in this position without special interests being interested in my vote. With that being said, the one endorsement I get, which is the most precious to me, is my family. Without a doubt, without their sacrifice and the time that they’ve allowed me to do this and engage in this activity, I couldn’t do it. I love Marin, love Kelly, thanks so much. I do want to point out as far as the number of Board meetings, I’ve never missed a Board meeting. I had my knees replaced last year and I planned my surgery specifically to occur right after the last Board meeting of the month, and then that first of August I was able to attend at the end of August the meeting then. I had to have someone drive me there, but other than that, I’ve only missed one work session in the last nine years, and that was when my knees had been replaced. In addition to that, they keep track of our hours we were trained. I have over 300 hours of Board training, and I believe that again is one of my fortes in order to re-elect me. To use those those hours that you spent as taxpayers to help train me to be a good Board member, to be a diligent Board member, to be a cooperative and practical Board member. I remind people that a lot of things we’ve learned – it’s a lot harder to vote yes than it is to vote no. I want to keep that in mind as a I go through these next few years, that we’ve made commitments to you and we’re going to continue to say yes to the school district because we’ve got the best school district around.”
”How can we keep our best and brightest teachers and administrators on our campus?”
“This is a really very important question. With our teachers, I always try to point out that our attrition rate is absolutely not higher than anybody else’s. Simply put, lots of teachers, their family structure changes, they end up with other opportunities, and we’re constantly battling against other school districts who want to hire our best and brightest away, which is tough because we’re not a huge school district where there’s going to be multiple opportunities to continue to climb. We get very good people in positions, and then we run into the situation they’re ready for the next step and we don’t have a position open because we’re not a 40,000 student school district. But with that said, I will mention this week- I’m an adult educator, I teach Champions School of Real Estate, I’ve been full time for the past four years. I just came from Fort Worth this evening from teaching a class all day. The one thing that I’ve noted, and I’ve had the chance this week on my days off, to teach the INCubator [Edu] classes in Ms. [CHS technology teacher Tiffany] Ganss room here at the high school. I talked to Sessions about it both Monday and Wednesday from a businessman’s point of view, it gives me an idea of what kids are looking for. It gives me an idea of ‘how do we keep these kids engaged’. We’re working as hard as we can to provide the tools for those teachers and the training for those teachers to do a good job. Kudos to Ms. Ganss because she’s doing a great job with this brand new program, the INCubator program, and those kids aren’t being incented, like they do in other schools, to put their projects out. It’s a business project and it’s kind of like “Shark Tank”. The bottom line is though this week I contributed to that, so at least there will be some type of financial reward or incentive for them to continue on and see the end of that.”