Green Bay Area Public School District building. (IMAGE: Courtesy of Fox 11 WLUK)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Upset members of the public are calling for Green Bay Area Public School District school board members to resign due to what they see as a lack of action regarding residency concerns of former board member Kou Lee.
Green Bay’s school board will appoint a replacement in the next few weeks for Lee, who resigned May 8 after a Green Bay Press-Gazette report raised questions whether he lived in the school district when he won his seat a year earlier.
A Green Bay resident emailed school board members two months earlier, on March 11, telling them it appeared Lee didn’t live in district.
“Seeing as you all were made aware of this and chose to do nothing about it, how can we as residents have faith that you’re qualified to appoint Kou’s replacement?” Green Bay resident Madeline Vasiliev asked school board members. “How does this give me faith that when my son enters kindergarten in a few years, I am making the right choice to send him to Green Bay Public Schools when you are making decisions?”
“We’re following state law in our process to replace or appoint a board member,” said James Lyerly, Green Bay’s school board president. “We’ve done it in the past and I think the process we have is very fair.”
Lyerly says he didn’t feel there was enough information in the March email to introduce an ethics complaint to the state, which he says would have been the best course of action for anyone who felt strongly about Lee’s residency.
“When we talk about factual findings, we are not the entity that does that,” said Lyerly. “That’s the Wisconsin Ethics Committee. Anyone who knew about this in advance could have made that same filing and started a process that would have been very legitimate and gotten us maybe to closure sooner.”
Lyerly shared why he didn’t believe there was enough information in the March email.
“It was two sentences long,” said Lyerly. “You had a person who, under penalty of law, attested to the validity and truthfulness of a statement, versus an email that said ‘I believe or I have some information that someone is not living in the district.’ Given those two pieces of information, I chose the information from the person who attested under the penalty of law.”
Lyerly says he believes Lee did the right thing in submitting his resignation. He also says he has not communicated with Lee since he provided his resignation.
“I really just hope you all take the time to consider some steps moving forward and make sure this doesn’t ever happen again,” said Katie Gentry, who ran for school board this spring but fell 316 votes short of getting a seat.
Lee won his seat in spring 2024.
Melissa Thiel Collar, legal counsel for the school district, says state law would have still required the board to appoint a replacement for Lee if he had resigned in March, prior to the most recent election.
People will be able to apply to fill Lee’s seat starting May 20 at 5 p.m. They will have until June 3 to submit an application.
The school board plans to hold a special meeting June 9 to screen applicants and another June 16 to interview and select a new board member.
The board plans to have the new member in place for their first meeting to be July 14.
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