Monday, June 22, 2020

 

A Long-Awaited Action

TORKELSON IS OUT!!!

The day many Mercer residents had hoped for arrived at 8:30 p.m. on Monday, June 22, 2020, when Mercer School Board President Bob Davis announced that Administrator Erik Torkelson had resigned.

 

Torkelson’s eight-year reign of mismanagement and misspending ended after a one hour and twenty-five-minute closed session of the board.  Details of the resignation were not announced except that Davis read a brief letter from Torkelson saying that he was resigning “for purposes of retirement”. 

 

The long-awaited Mercer School Board action came at a closed session “to discuss administrator leave status, and to potentially take action regarding same.”  The School Board had held numerous earlier closed sessions to discuss Torkelson’s leave status, but no action was taken.

 

Torkelson was placed on medical leave last June, and the board apparently had been wrestling with the problem ever since of how to terminate him. 

 

After Torkelson was placed on medical leave, it became clear to the school board, four of the five members of which were not controlled by him, that he had to go.  The composition of the board began to change with the April 7 election and with earlier elections and events. 

 

The board which Torkelson had controlled had been decimated one-by-one.

 

The final member of the Torkelson's minions, Deanna Pierpont, was soundly defeated in her bid to be voted back on the board in the April 7 election.  Another Torkelson crony, Micki Pierce-Holmstrom, saw the writing on the wall and chose not to seek reelection in the April 7 election.

 

Of the other members of Torkelson's babal, his mother-in-law, Kelly Kohegyi, and Denise Thompson, were voted off the board in earlier elections. The fifth member, Noel Brandt, resigned from the board when he moved out of town.