Ward 1
Aquilas Lokossou
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-338-8469 | Email
Aquilas is a Burlington native who has been an active student in the BSD attending Edmunds Elementary, Edmunds Middle, and graduated from BHS in 2018. Aquilas is receiving his B.S degree in Psychology from SUNY Plattsburgh this spring and will be attending UVM for his master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling this fall. Aquilas has been extremely involved in the Burlington community from a young age and is excited in working to better and support the development and experiences of the students in the Burlington School District.
Ward 2- Integrated Arts Academy
Faizo Hassan
Term Ends: 2024
Email
I am a proud 2019 graduate of Burlington High School and an alumni of Edmunds Middle School and the Integrated Arts Academy. I am excited to represent Ward 2 residents, students and their families. As a student in the inaugural Burlington City and Lake semester course at BHS I learned about the positive impact I can have serving as a community leader. I am motivated and passionate about the future of our BHS and BTC Campus!
Ward 3- Sustainability Academy
Polly Vanderputten
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-578-8653 | Email
Polly Vanderputten is a full-time public high school teacher with 20 years’ experience. She has taught in public schools in Chittenden County, in preschools in Vermont and in France, and in night classes for adults in New York City. She is a graduate of McGill University with a Bachelor of Arts in Littérature française and Religious Studies (1999), and she holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from UVM (2011). She currently teaches German and French at South Burlington High School.
Polly is also a cellist, performing anything from traditional classical repertoire to deconstructed, purely improvisational music. While her creative pursuits are primarily through music, she is passionate about the arts in general.
Polly has lived in Ward 3 since 2006. She has an eight-year-old daughter who attends one of the elementary schools, and connections through her to many families in the neighborhood. She sees all of her neighbors as stakeholders in the public schools in Burlington, whether they are raising children now, have children who are grown or do not have children, and she is honored to serve her dynamic, vibrant community as School Commissioner.
Ward 4- Flynn
Martine Gulick, Board Clerk
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-488-4445 | Email
Martine is a lifelong educator who has taught in Vermont and overseas and is currently the Director of Library Media Services at Essex High School and Center for Technology Essex. Martine attended public schools in South Burlington and has a BA and MA from the University of Vermont. She was the legislative concerns chair and is the current president-elect of the VT School Library Association.
Martine’s two children attended Burlington schools and are currently employing the skills, compassion and understanding they gained from an excellent public school education. Martine is eager to work with the citizens of Burlington to build schools that achieve equity, foster diversity and strive for academic excellence for all. For years she served on PTOs at CP Smith and Hunt Middle School, was a team parent at BHS and served on the BHS ReEnvision Committee.
Ward 5- Champlain
Lucia Campriello
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-391-0079 | Email
Lucia lives in Burlington’s South End with her husband Joe and two young daughters Angeline and Sofia. Outside of business hours Lucia and her family can be found traveling as a four-pack between the bike path, beaches, playgrounds, waterfront, Bolton Valley and Centennial Field (season depending)!
Professionally, Lucia’s children and their team of exceptional early childhood educators at Pine Forest Children’s Center inspire her advocacy for equity, affordability, and quality in Vermont’s child care system within Let’s Grow Kids’ campaign to solve Vermont’s child care crisis by 2025. More broadly Lucia’s career over the past two decades has included advocacy, policy, and philanthropy with a focus on supporting children and vulnerable populations.
Lucia enjoys volunteering her time supporting causes that are important to her, including board service with Generator, a makerspace in Burlington and with Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children, a statewide membership organization for early childhood educators. She is a former Steering Committee member with the Ward 5 Neighborhood Planning Assembly, and she is entirely honored to represent her Ward 5 community as School Board Commissioner.
Lucia received an MS in public affairs from the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston and a BA from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Ward 6- Edmunds Middle School & Champlain
Clare Wool, Board Chair, Facilities Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 917-912-4333 | Email
Clare is the Chairwoman of the Board. For over a decade Clare served as the PTO leader at Edmunds Elementary School and Edmunds Middle School where she worked for positive outcomes for all students, faculty, staff, and families. As Chair of Burlington High School’s Seahorse Pride, Clare worked to expand the support organization beyond athletics to encompass academics, arts, and student enrichments. Clare’s day-to-day experience in the schools motivated her to run for the school board. Drawing on her career as a Producer in the entertainment industry with over twenty years at Viacom Networks, Clare is committed to model best business practices and professionalism with the ultimate goal of excellence in education. Clare and her husband Sam feel extremely fortunate their three children are students in the Burlington public schools.
Ward 7- Hunt Middle School & CP Smith
Monika Ivancic, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-540-0830 | Email
My name is Monika Ivancic and I am delighted to be representing my constituents in Ward 7 on the Burlington School Board. I am a parent in the school district and have connections with many different people in this community. I am familiar with several elementary schools within the district, since my husband is a paraprofessional at Champlain, and my daughter has attended Edmunds, SA, and is now in 4th grade at IAA. As an instrument facility manager in the Department of Chemistry at UVM, I interact with students on a daily basis. For over 3 years I have been involved in Sustainability Academy’s PTO, attending meetings, assisting with planning and organizing events, and advocating for our school children. I have also been an instrumental part of SA’s PTO Diversity and Inclusivity team. I believe that a strong education system is of utmost importance to a thriving society. As your representative on the school board, I will work towards strengthening Burlington’s education system.
Ward 8- Edmunds Elementary School
Saja Almogalli
Term Ends: 2024
Tel: 802-503-4428 | Email
Despite only being in the United States for 6 years, Saja has accomplished a great deal. She became fluent in English, graduated BHS (while enrolled full time at CCV), and got accepted into UVM (where she is currently more than halfway through her pre-med program). While this may seem like a lot, her journey to get here, escaping the war in Iraq, living in refugee camps in Turkey, and arriving in the United States with her widowed mother and 6 of her 8 siblings, make it pale in comparison. But one of Saja’s greatest accomplishments was being chosen at the age of 18 to speak about refugee experiences at the World Peace Conference at the United Nations in New York City.
Saja has spent all of her time in the United States in Burlington, Vermont, a city she and her family truly love. That is why she ran for the School Board…..to give back and help those like her to better themselves, the school system, and the city of Burlington itself. Besides the school board, Saja also finds time to give back by volunteering to shadow a pediatrician at UVM Hospital and by dedicating time to FAULU, a non-profit student-school liaison organization.
Saja knows the issues facing students because she still is one. The good, the bad, what should be changed, what is working. She hopes to bring this fresh perspective to the school board to make it the best it can be…for students, parents, faculty, administration, and the Burlington community in general.
District Central- Integrated Arts Academy & Sustainability Academy
Jean Waltz, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2023
Tel: 802-355-7856 | Email
Jean Waltz, known as Jeannie, has lived in the Old North End since 1987 and has taught at the Rock Point School since 2000. A parent and foster parent of daughters who attended Burlington’s schools, she served as vice-president of the H.O. Wheeler PTO. She also served as an AmeriCorps volunteer in the schools for three years and coordinates “The Ramble,” the O.N.E.’s yearly celebration of creativity and community. Jeannie works to address the challenges in our diverse neighborhood while respecting neighbors’ multiple points of view.
District East- Edmunds Middle & Elementary Schools
Kathy Olwell, Curriculum & Personnel Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2023
Tel: 802-660-4910 | Email
I would like to introduce myself, my name is Kathy Olwell and I live in Ward 1. I am the East District School Board Commissioner. I have lived in Burlington for 25 years, first in the New North End after which we moved to Ward 1 in 1999. We moved here from Nuremberg Germany. I was born in Orange NJ and have lived in Stamford,CN; Charlotte and Asheville, NC, Atlanta GA; St.Louis MO, and Boston, MA. as well as Germany and France My husband and I have three sons all of whom went through the Burlington School system and I am recently retired as a social worker. I earned my Masters degree in Social Pedagogy from the Lutheran College of Social Work/Pedagogy in Reutlingen, Germany. In my role as a social worker, I have started programs for children and youth in both Germany and the United States.
In 1993, together with parents and teachers from Hunt Middle School, I founded the New North End Youth Center in the Armory on Gosse Court. I directed this center under the umbrella of King Street Youth Center and then as a program of Sara Holbrook Community Center from 1993-2015. In 1997, I started a small afterschool program at Hunt Middle School to offer mini programming in the arts and music funded by a grant from the Vermont Children’s Trust Fund. Out of this was born the vision of a city-wide afterschool program for which Amy Mellencamp (then the director of Curriculum/Grants for the school district) wrote the 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant. This grant funded the Burlington Afterschool/Kids programs that exist today in all nine Burlington Schools. Realizing how important programs are for kids during the long summer months, I together with staff designed and began the Burlington Middle School Summer Program in 1998. This program has grown over the years and now serves 300 middle schoolers from both Burlington and Winooski with 5 weeks of programs which are without cost to the students and their families. I was previously a member of the Burlington School Board from 1994-1997 and served as the Clerk of the board from 1996-1997. I am the treasurer of the board of the Burlington Students Foundation and am still active with Vermont Afterschool.
District North- Flynn, CP Smith, and Hunt Middle School
Kendra Sowers – Finance Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2023
Tel: 1-802-598-2346 | Email
District South- Champlain
Jeff Wick, Board Vice Chair, Policy & Governance Committee co-chair
Term Ends: 2023
Tel: 1-917-282-5256 | Email
Student Representatives to the School Board
Isaac Doggett | Email
I am a longtime member of BSD, previously attending IAA and EMS and currently a Jr. at BHS. Myself and other students in Burlington have gone through a lot in the last couple of years with COVID and the transition into dtBHS. I am looking forward to serving on the Board so that I can help students like me get our educations back to normal and have a strong finish to our time in the Burlington School District.
Julia Hondal email: hondalj@bsdvt.org
