Two seats, six candidates

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Andy Thomas, sixty-one, a retired health-care administrator, was appointed to the board in May 2010 and is currently its secretary. "The funding crisis is the overriding issue, but it's not really what school should be about," says the widowed father of a son in the schools. "We're here to provide a quality education to all students. The approach so far has been to cut fat, but now we have to look at other sources of revenue." This requires "another try at an education millage. We need to bring more money into the district."

Thomas believes he can be particularly useful to the board because "there's a widespread feeling that education needs to be defunded in Lansing. My experience with health care, my background working with PTO and education foundations, and my record on the board of reaching consensus makes me the right choice."

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