Nathan Hammaker, John Hopkinson, Douglas Lansing and Ryan St. Louis — all Lake Placid residents — are the candidates. The district includes the village of Lake Placid and the towns of North Elba and Wilmington.

The person who gets the highest number of votes in the election would earn the seat that currently belongs to Lansing, who was appointed to the board in January after former board member Martha Pritchard Spear resigned this past December. The person elected to Lansing’s seat would assume office on May 17 — the day after the election — and serve until June 30 before beginning a regular three-year term on July 1 that would end on June 30, 2026.

The second- and third-place vote-getters would earn the other two open seats, which currently belong to board members Joan Hallett-Valentine and Daniel Marvin. The two people elected to these seats would serve regular three-year terms beginning on July 1 — the beginning of the school district’s fiscal year — and ending on June 30, 2026.

The school board ballot will also include the district’s proposed 2023-24 budget, available at https://tinyurl.com/5c46srun, along with two propositions asking voters if the district should increase funding for the Wilmington E.M. Cooper Memorial Public Library and lease two buses for the 2023-24 school year — one 24-passenger school wheelchair bus and one eight-passenger school bus. District voters will also have an opportunity to take an exit poll after voting, which will ask whether voters believe the district should enact state-ordained property tax exemptions for district veterans and emergency service workers.

Voting takes place from 2 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, May 16. District residents in the town of North Elba will vote in the Lake Placid Elementary School cafeteria, and those living in Wilmington will vote at the Wilmington Community Center.

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Nathan Hammaker

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Hammaker, 49, and his wife Constance — who is a high school counselor in the district — have an 8-year-old daughter, Nora, who is a third grader at Lake Placid Elementary School. Originally from Peru, Hammaker has lived in Lake Placid for the past few years.

He is currently a project manager for High Peaks Builders, a Lake Placid-based construction company.

Hammaker said he’s been involved with the district — Nora plays sports in the district, and he’s gone to school meetings and helped to coach girls with special needs on the district’s cross country team — but he’s never been interested in sitting on a board. Now, he’s seeking a seat on the LPCSD board of education, both because of his stake in the district and because he said multiple people in and outside of the district have asked him to run over the last couple of years.

Hammaker believes these people see leadership qualities in him — he said he’s a team player, an active listener, and he believes he would stay task-oriented, organized, open-minded and objective when handling issues that come before the board.

Hammaker said he doesn’t yet know what his priorities might be as a board member — he said it’s hard to know what issues in the district to prioritize without getting acquainted with the issues the board is facing.

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John Hopkinson

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Hopkinson, 78, has served on LPCSD’s board of education once before — from 2012 to 2016. Now that he’s termed out of his 11-year stint on the Lake Placid-North Elba Zoning Board of Appeals, Hopkinson said he’s looking to return to the school board and continue giving back the Lake Placid community.

Originally from Connecticut, Hopkinson moved to Lake Placid in 1996 for his work with Upstate Biotechnology Inc., or UBI, a now-defunct company that was once stationed at the former Cell Science Center on Old Barn Road in Lake Placid. Hopkinson retired from his position as the vice president and general manager of UBI in 2005, but he said the community in Lake Placid and the quality of life here encouraged him and his wife, Patti, to stick around.

“It’s definitely the home that we made,” he said.

Hopkinson listed four priorities he’d want to address as a school board member: the physical and psychological well-being of district students and staff in the wake of increasing violence and bullying in schools across the country, rebuilding the district’s in-person curriculum and social skills after school shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, providing adequate compensation to recruit and retain district staff, and using taxpayers’ dollars well.

Hopkinson said he doesn’t have kids or family who attend or work in the LPCSD school system, and he believes his impartiality to district matters could lend him an independent voice on the school board. He said his business experience and ability to get along with people would also be strengths on the board.

In addition to volunteering on the ZBA and the LPCSD board in the past, Hopkinson served on the Adirondack Health Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2012 and the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society board from 2015 to 2020.

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Douglas Lansing

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Lansing, 59, is seeking a full term on the board after his four-month stint as an appointed member. Lansing ran for LPCSD’s board of education last year, though he and then-board candidate Beth Brunner lost to current board members Ron Briggs and Colleen Skufka. Despite the loss, Lansing said he kept attending school board meetings every month. He believes his involvement in the district was part of the reason he was appointed to the board after Spear’s resignation.

Lansing said he’s learned a lot on the board since January — specifically, that the district’s declining enrollment and difficulty recruiting and retaining employees are trickle-down effects of the area’s affordable housing crisis. Though solutions to the crisis are hard to come by as a board member, Lansing said finding developers to create more affordable housing like the new MacKenzie Overlook and Fawn Valley developments on Wesvalley Road — the latter of which has allocated some of its housing for district staff — could help to stem the declining trends.

A Lake Placid native, Lansing taught briefly in a Massachusetts school district as part of his graduate program with the University of Massachusets at Amherst. Lansing later got involved with the Community Theatre Players, a nonprofit theater group in Lake Placid, and was the technical director at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts from 1997 to 2016. Lansing served on the Community Theater Players board and the Lake Placid Sinfionetta board, and he’s currently on the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society board. Lansing said that, if elected to the school board, he’d be interested in helping out with proposed upgrades to the middle-high school auditorium’s lighting system given his background with the LPCA.

Lansing’s daughter, Ellen, was the LPCSD’s class of 2022 valedictorian. His son, John, is in the 9th grade at Lake Placid Middle-High School this year. Lansing said the school has been supportive of John’s bobsled training, offering educational leave programming to keep him enrolled and learning in the district even when traveling abroad for sport.

Last year, Lansing ran for the board on a platform of avoiding politicization of school issues, and he still believes in keeping his eye on the district’s mission to put students first and foremost. He said the school board feels fortunate that it hasn’t had to defend its policies and deal with the national pushback against Critical Race Theory and other curriculums in the school.

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Ryan St. Louis

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St. Louis, 39, is a lieutenant at the Federal Correctional Institute in Ray Brook, where he’s worked for the last 15 years. A lifelong Lake Placid resident, St. Louis is a nearly 25-year member of the Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department, serving as a captain for five of those years.

St. Louis and his wife, Laurianne — who’s the EMS supervisor and rescue lieutenant of Wilmington Fire and Rescue — have been together for the last nine years, sharing a family of four children. St. Louis said his kids, who are all in the LPCSD system, are his biggest motivation to run for the school board. As a longtime corrections officer and a father, St. Louis said allocating district funds to boost the safety of students, faculty and administration at LPCSD is his top priority.

“You look at this country now, and it’s not sleepy little Lake Placid anymore,” he said. “Stuff happens here.”

This past month, LPCSD was one of more than 50 school districts in the state that fielded false bomb threats. With the local increase in these swatting incidents — false threats of school violence intended to spark fear in school districts, which can sometimes be fatal — along with the national increase in school shootings, St. Louis believes LPCSD should double its single-factor screening procedures for district staff and visitors, as well as look at hiring a school resource officer for each of the district’s two schools.

As a board member, St. Louis said he’d be willing to learn anything he doesn’t already know. He believes in straightforward communication, and he wants to help boost transparency on the board. He said he believes the district’s communication is good, but he still thinks it could be improved.

“A lot of things can be solved with just talking, and I think there’s not enough of that going on,” he said. “There’s too much finger-pointing.”

St. Louis also wants to encourage better allocation of budget funds — finding ways to spend less when working through expensive capital projects as well as directing more money to security and safety in the district.