Bipartisan Norwin School Board victors say they hope to promote respect, avoid polarization

Members of the bipartisan “We aRe Norwin” slate of candidates will form a majority on Norwin School Board, according to unofficial election results.

All five members of the slate were leading in unofficial vote tallies from Tuesday’s election.

Tim Kotch Sr. led with 11.2%, and Nina Totin came in second with 10.7%. Heath Shrum, Matt Thomas and Bill Bojalad followed with 10.7%, 10.5%, and 10.3%, respectively. They defeated five opposing members of the “Change4Norwin” Republican ticket for the seats on the board.

Norwin alum Nathan Shrader is an associate professor of political science and co-director of the Center for Civic Engagement at New England College in New Hampshire. He researched Pennsylvania school board elections while at Temple University.

Shrader was surprised to see that all five members of the We aRe Norwin slate won together, a goal he thought would be “a deep Hail Mary play in football” to accomplish, especially for such a conservative area.

“I truly did not anticipate more than one or two of them getting through the general election. It bucks the trend,” he said. “They did the unexpected and the improbable in that school district.“

This year’s election reminds him of a previous Norwin board race in the late 1990s, in which a bipartisan group defeated a more conservative group for school board seats.

“When the more moderate, community- minded people with deeper ties to the area came together in 1999 and 2023 to kind of push back on the more extremes, they won both times,” he said.

He is interested to see if more slate-style strategies emerge in Pennsylvania school board races, and whether more groups of candidates form together instead of singular, self-recruited candidates emerging.

“When these candidates pool together their resources, volunteers and efforts, they can make more headway than one person running on their own,” he said. “I think for the larger part, it had to do with voters in the Norwin community being very frustrated with the continual source of embarrassment coming from the school board. It becomes a liability for the community, it becomes a liability to try to attract new people and new businesses.”

Easing division

As one of the five We aRe Norwin candidates, Bojalad, 55, a senior director of global logistics for scrap metal processor TMS International, said he and the other slate members were “feeling great” about the election.

The focus of his group’s campaign was “Respectful, Responsible, and Reasonable,” he said, and their biggest priority was to get Norwin’s school board focused on conducting the district’s business.

The board has been divided into two factions for 22 months, and earlier this year was stuck at a stalemate for weeks after board member Joanna Jordan fell ill. She died in August. Motions would deadlock with a 4-4 vote.

“Our priorities are really just to get Norwin back, (and) the school board back,” Bojalad said. “We’ve been running on a theme of Respectful, Responsible, and Reasonable, and conducting the district’s business in that fashion, getting past all the infighting on the board and getting back to the business of the district.”

Not all sitting board members were happy about the results.

In a post on the website for the opposing Change4Norwin, board member Alex Detschelt declared that “Norwin has fallen” and lamented that the district had become a “blue through and through” region. Detschelt was elected in 2021 following vocal opposition to mask mandates after the start of the pandemic, and will be up for reelection in 2025.

“The reality is that Norwin has been compromised,” Detschelt said in his letter, which condemned a number of topics he associated with liberal voters.

“Remember that if Norwin feels they made a mistake with today’s vote, that you can’t fix it in two years because only 4 out of 9 positions will be open,” he said. “You are stuck with what you voted for for at least 4 years by which time it will be too late.”

Detschelt has sued Superintendent Jeffrey Taylor and the school district in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, claiming they violated his First Amendment rights to free speech when Taylor criticized Detschelt for a social media meme that he posted on a private Norwin Facebook page in October 2022. Detschelt posted a Halloween costume meme targeting then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, referring to him with expletives. A decision has not yet been handed down in that case.

Bipartisan team-up

The We aRe Norwin slate was bipartisan, though all five ended up on the Democrat ticket: Bojalad is a Republican, as is Totin; while Kotch, Shrum, and Thomas are Democrats.

“When we formed this slate, we formed it with the whole idea that politics has no place in school boards,” Bojalad said, noting that the slate’s candidates would identify their party if asked, but didn’t make it a big part of their campaigns.

“It was very intentional that we would get a slate that included Democrats and Republicans.”

Totin, 31, a stay-at-home mom agreed, noting that a big part of We aRe Norwin’s motivation was to keep politics out of the board’s operations.

“We want the kids to be the priority, and just no politics involved whatsoever really, in the school board,” she said. “Community and kids (are) what we want to put a focus on — not having a political viewpoint have anything to do with any decisions that are being made.

“If we do disagree on something, we just respectfully communicate about it, because we will inevitably disagree on things.”

Kotch, 67, who was a math teacher, assistant principal, principal and assistant superintendent at Norwin in a 25-year career, says the slate’s priority will be to focus on educating students.

“That’s what we should be doing,” he said. “I think it’s going to take us meeting with the administration and seeing how things are, and getting the information that we need to make a plan moving forward.”

The road ahead

Moving ahead, We aRe Norwin candidates cited bullying, infrastructure improvements, class sizes, school safety and getting the budget on track as priorities to address.

Thomas, 49, student services director for the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit, was appointed to the school board in October by the Westmoreland County judges to replace the late Joanna Jordan. He said he was thrilled about the election results, and honored to serve Norwin School District’s community.

Fiscal responsibility, community engagement, and restoring “respect and trust” in the school board are top of mind for him.

“We also recognize the challenges ahead of us, and will rely on a talented administration, faculty and staff to guide our school district to new levels of excellence,” Thomas said in a statement.

Shrum, 54, who is a fifth grade teacher at Gateway School District, hopes that the whole board can work together toward a “common goal” by doing what’s best for district stakeholders.

“We just want to end the political talk that goes on with the school board, and make sure we are student-centered, and be respectful towards everyone in the community,” he said, emphasizing compromising, communicating and listening to get things done.

Bojolad said the new board members will “work very hard to get along with the existing members of the board.”

“I don’t think that is going to be an issue,” he said. “When push comes to shove, we are going to work together for the students, the faculty, the staff, and the taxpayers in the community.”