Lake School Board’s Mathias honored

Lake County School Board member Bill Mathias hasn’t pocketed a penny of the roughly $185,000 in salary he’s earned since taking office in 2012.

Instead, he’s donated it to local charities and the Lake County Educational Foundation, which supports the district with fundraisers, such as a takeoff on TV’s “Dancing with the Stars” and “stores” where teachers can pick up pencils, paper and crayons for students.

For his efforts, the Consortium of Florida Education Foundations last week recognized Mathias as its statewide “star” school board member for 2017.

To be honored out of the state’s 300-plus elected school officials is “very humbling to me,” said Mathias, whose late father, Bill, was a Duval County School Board member in the 1970s.

“Adults need to be careful because their kids are watching, and I watched my dad’s service with great admiration,” he said. “When it was appropriate for me to give back, just like my dad had given back, that’s when I decided to run for the School Board.”

Mathias, who has a business supplying and designing restaurant kitchens, donated equipment for high school culinary students at the recent Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Faire in Tavares, which is sponsored by the educational foundation.

As a board member, he established a transportation scholarship fund when he became concerned about the danger students face when walking to school.

In 2012, when state law mandated that school board members — and not teachers — receive a 10 percent raise, he began to donate the extra income to the county’s education foundation. He also donates his salary to the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and First Baptist Church of Leesburg.

Mathias said his dad told him he was surprised to learn that school board members were paid.

“He said it was about citizen service,” Mathias said. “I do it to honor my dad.”

Mathias was surprised by the honor. He said he studied the state’s school-funding formula for two days to prepare for a speech at the superintendent and school board state associations conference last week in Tampa.

“I came with all my charts and graphs and was ready to talk about it,” said Mathias, who was elected in 2012 and re-elected in 2014. “But it was a ruse.”

Instead, the Consortium of Florida Education Foundations awarded him and Collier County Superintendent Kamela Patton for exemplary leadership in education.

“Education is the best way an individual can change their circumstance, ” he said.