Hannah Edelen and Kareem Simpson, both members of the Covington Independent Board of Education, have been nominated as school board members of the year, an award given by national education nonprofit School Board Partners.
“At School Board Partners, we oftentimes talk about the fact that the best school board members understand that they’re not simply elected officials,” said School Board Partners CEO and Co-Founder Ethan Ashley, who presented the nominations to the board members on Thursday. “They are trustees of their communities, of their community’s values, their hopes but most importantly, their community’s children.”
Based out of New Orleans, School Board Partners is dedicated to “training, supporting, connecting and re-electing diverse school board members across the United States,” according to the organization’s most recent tax filings. The organization offers conferences, fellowships, training and consulting on school district governance policies. The organization served 189 individual school board members across 152 cities in 39 states in 2024.
Covington Board of Education Chair Tom Haggard nominated them both for the award. Edelen and Simpson are both running unopposed for reelection to the board this November.
Edelen is a former sixth grade teacher at the district. She was crowned Miss Kentucky in 2022. She’s the policy and advocacy director at Kentucky Youth Advocates, a nonprofit that focuses on data analysis and policy advocacy, and she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in education sciences from the University of Kentucky at the end of May.
“I’m grateful that the Covington community trusts me to be their advocate for kids on the school board,” Edelen told LINK nky.
Simpson, on the other hand, is a businessman, author and veteran. He’s active in several community organizations (besides the board) and is a representative for Covington on the Kenton County Planning Commission, where he is currently heading up an initiative analyzing housing data in the county. He graduated from Holmes High School in 1995.
“I am super honored and surprised,” Simpson said. “It is nice to be recognized, but it is kind of like gravy. This is not why I do it.”
Edelen and Simpson have both participated in School Board Partners programs, specifically a training cohort for school board members.
“They have nine months of training that they do,” Simpson said. “When I was in the cohort I went through, every month we met with other school board members from across the country, varied sizes of school districts. We had training provided by the School Board Partners on how to do policy, how to run a meeting–each month had a different focus.”
“They equipped us with a variety of different tools to think about how to be more effective as school board members, be it through policy or thinking thoughtfully about how to best align budget with student needs,” Edelen said.
Edelen and Simpson are competing against other nominees throughout the country. The winners of the contest will be announced at the School Board Partners national conference in Atlanta in mid-November.
