A diverse field is lined up to replace outgoing Palm Beach County School Board District 5 member Frank Barbieri, a true education champion.
Gloria Branch is a substitute teacher with 30 years in banking. Mike Letsky is an engineer and entrepreneur. Mindy Koch has decades of teaching experience, a doctorate in education — and Barbieri’s endorsement.
A fourth candidate, Charman Postel, stands out for her track record of local education involvement. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board recommends Postel for the District 5 seat in the Aug. 20 primary, which is nonpartisan and open to many South County voters.
A fifth candidate, Suzanne Page, who lost to Barbieri in 2020, also filed to run. She did not respond to a questionnaire or appear for an editorial board interview.
The district
District 5 covers Boca Raton, West Boca and parts of South Palm Beach County. Five of its 22 schools earned some of the county’s highest marks in recent reading and math tests, but the district as a whole fell from an A grade to a B last year.
Branch, 56, wants a return to teaching the basics, “to read, write, count and behave,” she said in a Sun Sentinel interview. She graduated from FAU with a finance degree and spent three decades in banking before launching The Gloria Group, a business consulting firm. She’s a substitute teacher, including at Spanish River High, which her daughter attends.
Branch is the daughter of former Palm Beach Superintendent and School Board member Art Johnson, who lobbies for a county principals’ group. If elected, Branch would vote often on reassignments, promotions and discipline against principals her father represents, which could pose a conflict.
Letsky, 47, has two children in District 5 schools. The Boca Raton businessman graduated from Penn State with a master’s in systems engineering and founded two businesses, including FutureGen Robotics LLC. The district “is a business without real businesspeople on the board,” he said, and gave a harsh critique of Superintendent Mike Burke: “We need to reset expectations with Mr. Burke or find someone who can do the job.”
Culture war warnings
It’s doubtful that Branch or Letsky would steer the board away from culture war skirmishes. Letsky said parents are turning to private schools in part because political ideologies are seeping into classrooms. Branch said restoring the district’s A rating requires shedding “remnants of equity and woke ideology.”
Koch, 70, is the former chair of Palm Beach County’s badly splintered Democratic Party. She holds a bachelor’s in special education from California University, a master’s in gifted education from the University of Alabama and an Ed.D. in education from Nova Southeastern University.
Barbieri praised Koch’s four decades as a teacher and school administrator, with 30 years in Palm Beach and Broward public schools. To address overall poor reading and math scores, Koch says more emphasis on pre-K through Grade 3 is key.
“The better a child is performing in reading and math by third grade, the more likely they are to graduate high school,” Koch said.
Postel’s background
Postel, 37, was born in Boynton Beach to Haitian-American parents. A substitute teacher since 2019, she has been in the classroom far less. But teaching is only a part of her extensive commitment to local education.
A Boca Raton mother of four, she holds board seats on the Florida PTA, the county PTA and the school district’s Boynton Aerospace Science Academy. She chairs the district Academic Advisory Committee and is on the Diversity and Equity Committee. In 2017, she won a National PTA School of Excellence award for her work at JC Mitchell Elementary.
An FAU graduate with a degree in interdisciplinary studies, Postel also has a business background. She is a principal of CLRP & Associates, an event management company, and founded Bold Foundation, a leadership development nonprofit.
Postel offered different takes on district challenges.
She opposes spending state tax dollars on private school vouchers but acknowledged parents may have valid reasons to choose them. Addressing the district’s high truancy should include listening to children, she said: “Nine out of 10 times, when we survey our children,” she said, the hurdle is found.
A misguided attempt to label Postel as antisemitic resurfaced after she filed to run. It was a result of a months-old PTA dispute. A complaint was filed with the school district, but Postel said she was not told about it until the Sun Sentinel asked her about it. The editorial board investigated, conducted a follow-up interview with Postel, and found the allegation to be groundless.
If no candidate wins a majority on Aug. 20, the top two finishers will meet in November.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
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