Board member to resign
Wilkerson first elected while still a high school student
POTTSTOWN » Emanuel Wilkerson, who was elected to the Pottstown School Board at age 18, has announced he will resign his seat in the fall.
Wilkerson, now 21, will attend Temple University next semester where he will study, to no one’s surprise, political science and pre-law.
“It’s with great sadness that I announce that I will stepping down from the Pottstown Board of Education. It has been my honor to serve the students, staff, and community of Pottstown,” he posted on his Face-
book page Aug. 10.
Although he has made the announcement, Wilkerson’s resignation will not become effective until Oct. 1, “in order to let the district get the school year started before they have to start looking for a replacement,” he told Digital First Media.
Although he is still in his first four-year term, Wilkerson has technically served for five years when his two years as a non-voting student member of the board are included in the calculation.
The person chosen to replace him will serve until December 2019, and must then run for a full four-year term if he or she wishes to remain on the school board.
“We have accomplished some momentous things for Pottstown,” Wilkerson said Aug. 10. “I think the most important was our advocacy. We have advocated in Harrisburg and across the state and made ourselves and our issues known,” he said. “No one ignores us any more.”
He singled out school board member Kim Stilwell, former member Ron Williams, as well as Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez as being key leaders of that advocacy.
That advocacy has not only elevated Pottstown’s leadership, but given Pottstown more leverage with state leaders in Harrisburg, he said.
Both Pottstown’s state representatives and its state senator have signed on in support of legislation that would speed the pace at which education funding is distributed through the fair funding formula to boost Pottstown’s state funding by more than $13 million a year.
That position was also recently endorsed by Gov. Tom Wolf, who, like the three area representatives, is running for reelection in the fall.
During his tenure, Wilkerson also hosted a series of town meetings in 2016 called Pottstown TALKS that were an attempt to gain consensus on issues like Pottstown’s social divisions, the tax base, economic development and more.
Wilkerson first joined the school board as a junior in high school and quickly gained notoriety for his push to end the requirement for high school students to wear school uniforms — an issue over which parents were evenly split.
He first convinced the board to put the students on trial, and see if they could monitor what they wore and demonstrate that the uniforms were not required.
Since that time, high school students have been exempt from the uniform policy.
In May, that change in policy was extended to the entire district.
In 2015, Wilkerson ran a write-in campaign to get on the ballot and subsequently won a seat that November while still a student at the high school.
Since graduating, Wilkerson has been working and attending classes at Montgomery County Community College. He announced on Aug. 1 that he had been accepted at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Wilkerson is fond of an Abraham Lincoln quote: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
And so in his announcement, he repeated that along with another of his frequent refrains — that he plans to run for president in 2036.
Those who know him know he is only partly joking.
It is not immediately clear how the school board will go about selecting Wilkerson’s replacement, although most recently it has held public interviews of those who apply.
The matter may be taken up at this month’s school board meeting which, according to a public notice, has been moved to Thursday, Aug. 23, at 7 p.m. in the high school cafeteria.