FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In remaking the Broward School Board on Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis turned to four Republicans — two of whom have School Board experience and the kind of insider knowledge that could help them effect change in the problem-plagued School District.
The Republican governor has now appointed five of the nine School Board members in the overwhelmingly Democratic county.
“They’re all excellent picks,” said state Rep. Chip LaMarca, R-Lighthouse Point, said about Friday’s appointments.
“It’s going to be a short-term scenario. I hope they can really work together to resolve some of the issues that are in that [statewide grand jury] report,” LaMarca said. One new member’s seat will run through the 2024 election, while the three other appointments announced Friday expire just after the 2022 election later this fall.
The grand jury, convened at the request of DeSantis, recommended in its Aug. 19 report that DeSantis suspend four School Board members. Seven days later DeSantis did so.
Another big change: Six months ago, all nine elected Broward School Board members were women. The five people DeSantis has appointed to School Board seats are all men.
Torey Alston
Torey Alston, 38, one of the new School Board members, had been serving on the Broward County Commission. He was appointed by DeSantis to fill a vacancy that started in January. Mayor Michael Udine said Alston resigned from the commission on Friday. The commission term Alston had been filing ended just after the November 2022 election.
LaMarca said the School Board seat Alston now holds runs through the 2024 election. The three other appointments announced Friday expire just after the 2022 election.
Alston, a Black Republican, unsuccessfully ran for a School Board seat in 2012 and previously served as a student representative to the School Board. He was an appointed by former Govs. Rick Scott and Charlie Crist as a Florida A&M University Trustee. Crist was a Republican during his previous term as governor; Now a Democrat, Crist won his party’s nomination on Tuesday to run against DeSantis in November.
He is certain to shake up the School Board. He advocated for Broward voters to reject the school tax increase that was on Tuesday’s election ballot — it passed — writing that “I cannot support this additional tax increase on Broward families.”
As a member of the County Commission, he also objected to the political strategy employed by the School District to increase the chances of passage. Over Alston’s objections, the School Board got his then-colleagues on the County Commission to put the referendum on the August ballot, knowing that the primary contests would draw a disproportionate number of Democrats to the polls. He wanted the referendum on the November ballot, when there is higher voter participation.
Before DeSantis made him a county commissioner, Alston was part of the DeSantis administration, serving as chief of staff at the Florida Department of Transportation. Years earlier he was an aide to former County Commissioner Barbara Sharief.
He is a graduate of Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach. At a news conference when DeSantis appointed him to the County Commission, Alston said, “I am a product of Broward County.”
Kevin Tynan
Another DeSantis appointee, Kevin Tynan, has previous experience as an appointed member of the Broward School Board.
In 2009, he was appointed to replace Beverly Gallagher, who was suspended after her arrest on federal corruption charges. She was suspended and Tynan was appointed in 2009 by Crist.
Tynan, 63, ran for the job in 2010 but lost the election to Patricia Good, one of the four School Board members DeSantis suspended Friday for what he said was “clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance” detailed in the report of a statewide grand jury.
Tynan is a former chairman of the Broward Republican Party.
He was among the dozens of invited Republican guests in the audience on Aug. 18, when DeSantis appeared in a courtroom at the Broward County Courthouse to announce the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was arresting 20 people for allegedly voting illegally in 2020.
Tynan has been a gubernatorial appointee to the South Broward Hospital District Board, the government agency that’s better known by its brand name Memorial Healthcare System.
He was an appointee to the Judicial Nominating Commission for Broward County, the panel that screens and recommends gubernatorial appointments for open judgeships, by former Gov. Rick Scott. He served as JNC chairman.
Ryan Reiter
Ryan Reiter, 36, who was an aide to LaMarca when LaMarca was a member of the Broward County commission is another new School Board member.
He has other government experience: after working for LaMarca, he went to work for the Children’s Services Council, where he was instrumental in the strategy to win passage of a 2014 referendum in which Broward voters approved keeping the agency in business.
Reiter is currently the director of government relations at Kaufman Lynn Construction. The company’s website shows it has worked on some public and non-public school and university construction projects, including reconstruction of Ford Lauderdale High School completed some years ago.
His experience in the field is significant, given the grand jury report. The biggest failure identified in the report was in the School District’s failures in connection with $800 million of construction borrowing authorized by voters. Work has been mired in delays for years and costs have escalated, the grand jury found, faulting “years of mismanagement” from school district officials and the School Board’s failure to hold those responsible accountable.
Reiter is a former Marine sergeant who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and is also a past president of the Broward Young Republicans.
He is a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the site of the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre in which a gunman killed 17 people.
Nandy Serrano
Manual “Nandy” A. Serrano, 52, doesn’t have a political profile.
He is founder and CEO of the financial company Clubhouse Private Wealth, and has worked extensively as a financial adviser and in insurance, according to the biography on his firm’s website.
“Nandy Serrano is a good pick considering the financial corruption that was outlined by the grand jury,” said Richard DeNapoli, the Broward state Republican committeeman and former county party chairman. DeNapoli works in finance and knows Serrano through business.
Serrano played baseball at Florida State University and later professionally as a member of the Anaheim Angels organization. He was a member of the Puerto Rican baseball team at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. As a member of the same team, he was a silver medalist at the 1991 Pan American games in Cuba.
He has also been a member of the board of the Florida Sports Foundation. The foundation is the official sports promotion and development entity of the state, operating through Enterprise Florida, the public-private economic development agency. DeSantis’ office described him as a member of the board, but he wasn’t listed Friday afternoon as a board member on the agency’s website.
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