Zach Wendling
LINCOLN — Gov. Jim Pillen will not fill a vacancy on the Nebraska State Board of Education through the end of year, before a new member elected two weeks ago takes the post in January.
Laura Strimple, a spokesperson for Pillen, confirmed to the Nebraska Examiner on Tuesday that Pillen would not make the appointment to the District 4 seat, which opened Oct. 4 when the board accepted the resignation of Jacquelyn Morrison of Omaha. Strimple said there are more than enough members on the eight-member board to close out the year, with no “controversial items” anticipated for its Dec. 6 meeting.
“It would require significant resources to recruit and vet potential successors to serve, even for such a short period of time,” Strimple said in an email. “It is unnecessary to do so, particularly when the new board members elected November 5 will take office in early January.”
The member-elect is Liz Renner, who received about 63% of the vote. Renner is a writer and producer with a background in communications strategy who has volunteered as a library assistant, room parent and school yearbook committee chair for her daughter, who is currently a student in Omaha Public Schools.
Renner told the Examiner on Nov. 12, one week after the election, that she had checked the governor’s website a few times after Morrison’s resignation but the vacant seat was not listed. Two days later, she formally tossed her application into the ring anyway.
“I’m looking forward to beginning my duties as a member of the State Board of Education and if there had been a chance, through an appointment, to begin earlier I would have gladly accepted,” Renner said in a Tuesday text.
Strimple previously said that after the board formally accepted Morrison’s resignation, Pillen’s office would begin soliciting applications and fill the vacancy “as promptly as possible.”
David Jespersen, a spokesperson for the Nebraska Department of Education, which the board oversees, said Nov. 12 that the department hadn’t heard from the Governor’s Office after the department notified Pillen’s staff in early September that Morrison intended to resign.
Jespersen said there was a possibility there would not be an appointment within the 45-day limit as Pillen could indicate, as he now has, that the requirement would impose an “undue burden.”
At its Dec. 6 meeting the board is set to consider an updated state literacy plan and a model policy for the state’s smallest school districts, those with fewer than 5,000 total residents, to authorize select school personnel to carry firearms on school property.