Columbia Board of Education candidate interview: John Lyman
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Columbia Board of Education President John Lyman wants three more years.
Lyman is one of the three incumbents running for reelection to the school board in a four-way race. The board is made up of seven members, and the election has the opportunity to change one face on the board.
Lyman's opponents are April Ferrao, Paul Harper and newcomer Dr. Keary Husain.
LUCAS GEISLER: Welcome, everybody, to the ABC 17 News Your Voice, Your Vote voter guide for April 2026. I'm Lucas Geisler. Appreciate you joining us. I'm here with John Lyman and we're talking about his race in April 2026. John, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to start, and what it is that you're running for.
JOHN LYMAN: Yeah, uh, my name is John Lyman, and I'm running for, uh, one of the three seats on the Columbia Public School Board.
GEISLER: Can you give us just a little background about yourself on just how long have you been in Colombia?
LYMAN: We moved here in 1986, when my dad got a job at the University of Missouri. He was the chair of the anthropology department, so, uh, first grade through 12th grade, Columbia Public Schools, graduated from Rock Ridge High School. University of Missouri was the only school that I considered going to. Got a degree in geography with a minor in history, and then I was one of the early adopters at Veterans United Home Loans, so I've been there for about 20 years. I'm a senior loan officer there, kind of passed to the board then, first got elected in April 2023.
My wife being a school teacher, having three kids in the district kind of led me down that path, and really the short version of the story is I did what, you know, I finally listened to my wife when she said, 'Well, would you just do it already?' because I talked about doing it for years and years and so finally went ahead and did it.
GEISLER: Elected in April 2023 for your first term on the board, why do you want a second term?
LYMAN: We're on the right path. We're on a great upward trajectory right now in Columbia Public Schools. I mean, you could look at our APR [Annual Performance Report] you can look at, our teachers salaries, all of those things are going up in the right direction. This is a project that I've been really thankful to be a part of, and I hope to continue to be a part of that. We've got a lot of great momentum. There's still obviously things to work on. There's some things on the horizon financially for the district that I think everybody is concerned about and so, being a part of that process and having this historical knowledge of kind of where we've been over the last three years of being on the board and then 40 years of living here, yeah it makes me ready to continue moving us in the right direction.
GEISLER: On that topic of some things you see on the horizon, what do you think is the most important issue facing Columbia Public Schools right now?
LYMAN: Money is the easy answer, you know, we've got $200 million to $300 million worth of deferred maintenance, and so that's maintenance on our buildings that exist. We have thousands of square feet of buildings. Some of those buildings are 100+ years old, like Hickman High School. Some of them are brand new, like Eagle Bluffs, so all of that money we need to come up from somewhere and so we're starting to look at our budget and figure out where we can thin some things out so that we have that money. And we also know that money from the state and from the federal government is starting to thin out a little bit, so we've got a payroll to keep, we've got lots of work to do in our buildings, and so making sure we have that money coming in to be able to afford those things is crucial.
GEISLER: How do you approach a budget? You've done a few of them now since you've been on the board. So, so what is, what's your approach? What's your style that people can expect if they send you for another term?
LYMAN: A lot of it is looking at just where are we spending money and how is it Impacting our classrooms, because at the at the end of the day that's what we're trying to do is run a school district, and our students are our customers. We wanna make sure we're putting them in the best learning environments, and so looking at all of those line items and seeing where we're spending that money and how is it positively impacting our classroom environments, how is it impacting our teachers and our faculty and our staff, and if there are things that don't make sense or that we may need to change or seem duplicated, you know, those are the eight items that we need to look at and say: 'Is this really what we need to do? Is this what we want to continue spending money on? What's the return on investment on these things?'
We've spent millions of dollars on, you know, X, Y, or Z. Are we getting the return that we should be getting on that?
GEISLER: I know one thing that's been a priority for boards for a bit now is getting attendance back up, getting kids more frequently back to school since, especially since the pandemic... What progress have you liked? What's something that you hope to keep pushing forward on that if elected again?
LYMAN: So we know that the goal is 90% of our students in seat 90% of the time or more. That's kind of what DESE [Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education], what the state of Missouri really wants to see, but that's what we wanna see also. We wanna see that one of the big reasons for that is because we know that students that are in seat 90% of the time or more, they do better on our standardized tests and everything else. Now it's not, 'Hey, come to school because we wanna do better on the standardized state test to have a higher APR.' It's they're better students because you're in seat and you're learning. A big push, though, for us has gotta be continuing to educate what 90% means. You hear 90%, and you think, well, that's awesome, that's a minus, you're passing, you're graduating with a 90%, but if you put that in terms of number of days, a student who's only in seat 90% of the time, missed 15 days of school. And so if you think about subjects like math or English that build upon each other, where if you miss four or five days of school here or there or if you come in late or you leave early or if you have an extended lunch, you're missing out on a lot of that education time and so you're behind by missing a day or two or an hour or two here or there. So just continuing to educate folks says, hey, attendance is really important, being at school or, you know, on time, staying the whole day, is really important. We're starting to hear some preliminary things from the administration that attendance is looking really good this year, much bigger, a little bit bigger of a jump than last year, so positive momentum, and things happening there, but attendance is crucial.
One of the things that I've also started to do is I've started to talk to other board superintendents in Mid-Missouri about what they're doing to increase attendance. Schools look at it individually, districts look at it as a whole, but then what are we doing? In North Callaway or South Callaway or in Fulton, what are we doing in Hallsville or Harrisburg? What are we doing in Ashland to try to get together to figure out. We're a Mid-Missouri community, we can work together to help solve this problem.
GEISLER: In the three years since you've been on the board, is there anything that you feel like has gone well that you'd like to keep pushing forward, or are there things that you see that the district still needs to get better at when it comes to making sure schools are safe?
LYMAN: Well, one of the big things that we did when I first got on the board was we brought in the weapons detection systems at our high schools, and there were certainly some hiccups there the first few days. I was there kind of watching a couple months in and went to each high school each morning to kind of see how they did it. And while they're very similar, they're very different. I mean, our buildings weren't built for these things, and so we're putting an exterior system into the interior of a building that wasn't designed for it, but our faculty and our staff did great with figuring out how to make those work. Our students have done great in figuring out how to become efficient in going through those systems. Um, it's not something anybody wants to do, but it's kind of one of those unfortunate realities that we live in. One place that I'd like to see the district get better at and that we're continuing to push on, and I know that it's something our policy committee has been working on for months, is that bullying policy and the procedures and things that need to be in place for when a student does feel that they're bullied. It's moving the bullying report that's kind of hidden right now on our website to an upfront top of mind. I don't wanna say it's gonna be a big red button on the home page. But something that's more prominent, something that's easier to access for our families so that they know, hey, if this is happening, this is where you go, this is what you do, these are the next steps, these are the things that happen after you've done that report so that there can be resolution so that we do ensure that all of our students are in safe learning environments
GEISLER: And I imagine as a board member, bullying is something you hear a lot about from parents. It's probably many people bringing you individual claims, general claims, like lots of that. What do you think is the board's current relationship with the public? Where do you think you're at with that?
LYMAN: So when I joined the board, the board was very, the analogy that I'm giving is like we're very "Wizard of Oz." It was very "Wizard of Oz." There was a man behind a curtain. And one of the things that we've tried to do over the last few years is open that curtain up and expose what the board does a lot more. There was a lot of, I know for me personally, during COVID, watching what the board did and didn't do was a big eye opener for me. But that curtain was, while it was cracked, we needed to just pull those shades apart.
If I could leave being on the school board, being known for being one thing, it would be the person that anybody can call. I've had the same cell phone number for years it's the one on the website. I didn't go get a different one When running for the board, much to the chagrin of my wife and my kids because they know that a phone call is coming every night from somebody, but it's, I wanna be known as the person that you can call or email or text, that somebody could show up and talk to in the grocery store and ask questions about what's going on or share their concerns, but that's the board in its entirety has really worked on that over the last few years is, is opening up that availability with our listening sessions and extending out the amount of meetings and forums that we had about redistricting, any place that we can open that curtain up we wanna do it.
GEISLER: Any ways that, if elected again, you'd like to keep moving that ball forward?
LYMAN: Well, I think we're gonna, the listening sessions have been great. I mean we just had another discussion at our most recent work session about the time and location we're listening to our community as to when they wanna have those where they wanna have them. We've had them in schools. We had a really well-attended one at the public library. We're gonna have another one at the public library. We moved the location because the public library, everybody knows where it is, and maybe less intimidating for folks. But yeah, the listening sessions is a big thing when we have big districtwide changes like our continuous school improvement plan, like our 10-year master plan, it's working with our community. What do you expect from the district? Our portrait of a graduate project that our students have been working on, that was something where, you know, a group of students worked with 300-400 different community leaders and business leaders to develop what this project is. We have to involve our community in these decisions. Columbia Public Schools is such an integral part of Columbia to not involve Columbia would be detrimental to the district.
GEISLER: Let's go back to money for a second, if we can. There's a conversation, lots of conversations in Jefferson City about how to fund schools. What do you think about the idea of performance-based funding for schools?
LYMAN: It's scary, yeah, it's scary because you know teachers teach. Educators educate because that's what their passion is, that's what they wanna do. Any child who walks up to that door at our schools, we're gonna find a spot for them we're gonna find a classroom for them, we're gonna get them in an environment and in a culture that's gonna be about learning that's what education is, it's about learning and it's about growing and becoming good members of society. If you start attaching metrics to that learning where your district does better, you get more money, well, that's gonna, could potentially introduce a lot of things people are gonna, you know, I'm not gonna say it, but I'm gonna say it, you know, you might fudge a little bit of the numbers here and there. Things are gonna look better than they may actually be because you want more money, and then those schools that are struggling that are getting less money. Well, what we know is that schools and districts who get less and less money, they struggle, and those scores go down and down and down, and then they get less and less money. It's just a way to, really, when you tie success, education success, to funding, you're putting at risk what the job is, and it really does put a big crack in public education when you do that.
