Freeport Area School Board has new leadership, 2 new members

The Freeport Area School Board has a new president, vice president and a couple new members.

Former vice president Adam Toncini was appointed as board president, and Greg Selinger was named vice president at Thursday night’s reorganization meeting.

Newcomers Melanie Zembrzuski and Gary Risch Jr., along with incumbents John Haven and Christine Davies, were sworn in to four-year terms.

“I’m looking forward to working with the old and the new board members,” Toncini said. “We’re going to work with the administration. I think we have a great school district.”

Toncini, a finance manager for Concordia, said his major issue moving forward is transparency.

“Unfortunately, with the pandemic the trust between teachers, school boards and any government is frayed right now,” he said. “I want to be able to have the conversations with the people that are sitting in the audience and be more open as far as decisions so people can understand what we deal with on our end.”

Both Toncini and Sellinger were elected to the school board in 2019. They said they learned a lot from former board president Dan Lucovich, who was in the audience Thursday.

“We spent a lot of time together with Dan,” Selinger said. “He helped us out a lot going through the teachers’ contracts this year, dealing with all the covid issues. It’s been a long two years since we came on the board.”

Selinger is director of operations at Weleski Transfer in Tarentum. He served as second vice president under Toncini.

“We just kind of shifted up a seat,” Selinger said. “I’m excited. Hopefully we get to start talking about things other than masks. I’m looking forward to moving on from covid and learning to deal with it. I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. As a board and an organization we really have to tackle how to deal with it going forward and not try to hope that it’s over with soon.”

Risch is director of commercial sales for Diehl Automotive. Zembrzuski is a pharmaceutical sales rep for Takeda.

Both expressed enthusiasm for their new opportunity to impact the district.

“I’m extremely excited to hopefully help make a difference in regard to some of the current issues, especially around covid,” Zembrzuski said.

Haven, a retired supervisor from Allegheny Technologies Inc., is entering his second term.

Davies, a teacher at Knoch High School, has been on the board 12 years.

“Continuing the work that we’re doing is a wonderful thing to say,” Davies said. “We’re talking about advancing curriculum, college in the high school courses, all new technological developments for our students, more hands-on engineering concepts in the high school. I’m real interested in the curriculum and the health concepts.”

She also noted the district recently hired a mental health specialist, and has made several advancements in preparing students for the future.

The school board maintained the meeting schedule with agenda sessions the first Thursday of the month and voting sessions the second Thursdays of the month, both at 7:30 p.m. at the high school.