By Jef Rietsma
For the Detroit Tigers, it was Trammell and Whitaker. Utah Jazz had Stockton and Malone. And in Vicksburg, the duo of Lohman and Knowles will go down in history as the longest-serving tandem in Vicksburg Community Schools Board of Education history.
Carol Lohman and Skip Knowles will complete a tenure of 40 years each as board members when they attend their final board meeting Dec. 9. They are not seeking re-election, bringing to a close a four-decade run that started in the mid-1980s.
Lohman never dreamed she would serve for 40 years when she decided to run for election, she said. The 83-year-old Lohman said she felt joining the district’s board of education was a way to support an educational entity she believed in.
“I really hadn’t thought too much about it but then I realized there were people who served on the school board when I was a student and they made decisions based on my best interests as a student, so I decided to give it a shot,” Lohman said. “Skip and I came in at the same time, and that was a coincidence, and I guess you could say it was also a coincidence we’ve ended up serving the same length of time.”
Lohman, whose kids and grandkids all went through VCS, said she and Knowles joined at a time when the district was commencing a superintendent search. She said the honeymoon period as a new board member was short-lived, as interviews and the search process started right away. She recalled it being a valuable learning experience.
Though she will no longer be a board of education member, Lohman said she plans – for now – to stay on as a 43-year member of the board that oversees Vicksburg Community Schools Foundation. Still, she said her time on the school board will always provide a sense of fulfillment.
“I felt needed and I think that’s good for a person. I feel like I’ve made some good contributions,” Lohman said. “There have been a lot of improvements. We’ve had a community that’s very supportive and we’ve always strived for excellence. We’ve always had good administration, and an outstanding teaching staff and support staff, so there’s a lot to be proud of here.”
Lohman joked there’s no need to put up statues or name something after her or Knowles. In fact, she said, such acknowledgment would be embarrassing since she served as a board member not for the glory but because she cares deeply about Vicksburg Community Schools.
Lohman had previously served as board vice president for more than 20 years. She requested, however, that someone else fill that position to gain experience as she winds down her term. The VP spot ultimately went to David Schriemer.
With just three monthly board meetings remaining before the end of her impressive run, Lohman said she isn’t sure what she’ll do when the board stages its first meeting of 2025, and she and Knowles will not be present.
“I know it’ll be January, it’ll be dark outside and it’ll probably be cold, so maybe I’ll relax and enjoy being warm inside my house that night,” she laughed. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll tune in online.”
Lohman and her late husband owned a veterinarian clinic until retiring in 2004. Since 2020, Lohman has worked part time three days a week at a vet clinic, a job she plans to continue.
Knowles, 75, has served as board president for 37 of his 40 years on the board. He said he was asked by a few board members at the time if he would consider running for one of two seats up for grabs in 1984.
He had been active in a school-related committee and had a child in first grade at the time.
The bottom line?
“I cared about the schools,” he said. “I didn’t join the board because of a problem I had with it, I just wanted to be a part of something that I felt was and still is very important to the community.”
Knowles remembered when the board used to start its meetings at 8 p.m. and, in the era before computers, background notes prior to each board meeting exceeded a hundred pages.
From the beginning, Knowles said his objective as board president centered on improving communication, maintaining a good reflection of the community and overseeing consistent improvement in the education process.
Does Knowles feel he has achieved those goals?
“Yes, I do. I really do. I’m proud of where we are,” he said. “Probably what I’m most proud of is how we developed a consistent process of raising our own superintendents. We’ve had administrators who went from our farm team, if you will, to becoming super-successful superintendents elsewhere.”
Knowles and Lohman worked with six different superintendents over the past 40 years, starting with Denny McMann. At the time, McMann was just a few months away from accepting a job at a larger district.
The worst part about his time on the board, Knowles said, has been handling student expulsion and disciplinary hearings.
“That’s never a fun thing and it’s certainly not fun for the board president because our business is to educate kids, not kick them out of school,” Knowles said. “But we also have a strong adherence to our drug policy and our disciplinary codes. For the most part, however, we welcomed those kids back and we were able to give them a diploma.”
Knowles said he has been fortunate to serve on a board with like-minded people committed to making Vicksburg Community Schools a better place.
“We’ve never been a bunch of ‘I’ people, we’ve always been a bunch of ‘we’ people on the board and I think that’s important for everybody to realize,” he said. “We have had seven people on the same wavelength. That didn’t mean we all agreed on everything all the time, but we knew how to handle disagreements. It’s always been about communication and having the right kind of administration so the administration and the board can work together.”
Knowles has been a member of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency Board of Education for 20 years and is president of its board, too. His term with KRESA expires in 2029.
For now, however, Knowles said he is starting to feel melancholic about the end of an era at Vicksburg Community Schools. Saying goodbye won’t be easy and Knowles was unable to predict how well he’ll be able to maintain his composure Dec. 9.
Still, he said he hopes the candidates who replace him and Lohman are in it for the right reasons.
“I worry that we get candidates on the board that have an agenda,” he said. “But I trust the voters and it’ll work out fine. It takes the group, not one person or two people; it was never all Carol and me. It’s the whole board. I’ve always used the expression that Vicksburg schools needed to be a family and we should never lose sight of the little eyes.”
Knowles has two children and two grandchildren who went through VCS; two more are current students.
