WESTSIDE PICKS TRUSTEE FLIGHT TEST CENTER MANAGER WINS VOTE.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

LANCASTER - Westside Union School District trustees selected an Air Force Flight Test Center program manager who runs a youth mentoring program to replace former trustee Scott Gmur.

John Ward, a Quartz Hill resident who has a son at Sundown School, is scheduled to be sworn in Feb. 5 to replace Gmur, who resigned last month.

``Based on the criteria that I set, he was the best candidate,'' trustee James Brink said.

Following four votes in which no applicant got a majority, the board voted 3-1 to name Ward. Seven people had applied but one candidate had earlier dropped out.

Ward, who has a master's degree in electrical engineering and is the founder of the Omega Youth Academy, a Lancaster-based youth mentoring and tutoring group, was out of town Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

The dissenting vote came from board member Gwen Farrell, who said she felt the post should have gone to Robin Kessler, who finished fourth in the November election just behind the winning three candidates.

``I just felt that we were so close to an election, that it should've been the next in line,'' Farrell said. ``I felt she has paid her dues over the years, and this would have been an opportunity for her to serve on the board. She knows the budget and the political things that go on in the district.''

Prior to the voting, people in the audience were invited to make statements on who they felt should be appointed, Superintendent Allan Sacks said.

In the first round of voting, each board member cast a vote for two candidates. Any candidate who did not receive at least one vote was eliminated in that round, Sacks said.

In the next four rounds of voting, no candidate got a majority of the vote, Sacks said. The other applicants were Alejandra Dunkel, Donna Margherita, Mary Vail and Robert Rough of Quartz Hill.

Trustee Marty Meeden favored Margherita but then voted with trustees Brink and Christine LeBeau to select Ward in the sixth vote, Sacks said.

Brink said Ward was free of any ties to school groups that would expect him to carry on their agenda, and he had the clearest vision of what the role of a board member is.

``I wanted someone who was unfettered by expectations of groups they had long standing with. He was not ... in any group. He was basically able to represent the entire district,'' Brink said.

Brink also felt Ward could bring a new perspective to the board as an engineer who comes from the government sector.

Gmur resigned Dec. 4 after six years in office, saying it was time to move on.

Ward has lived in the Antelope Valley for 18 years, district officials said.

Ward founded the Omega Youth Academy in 1997. The academy offers social and academic seminars and workshops throughout the year for teens to expand their ideas of what is possible, according to a Daily News profile of the group in 2000.

Concerned with seeing that teen-agers do not end up in jail, Ward used as his objectives four cardinal principles - manhood, scholarship, perseverance and uplift - which he learned from his college fraternity.

His main program, Omega Boys to Men Workshop, is geared toward sixth-grade to 12th-grade African-American boys.

This program teaches male developmental skills the teens will need to be successful men in society.