Board of Directors
Let’s start with the board of directors, a spin-the-bottle operation if there ever was one. Here are the board members identified on the NPU website on September 17 and October 12, 2022:
| Sept 17, 2022 Board of Directors | Oct 12, 2022 board |
| Peter Cunningham | Peter Cunningham |
| Arthur Soriano | |
| Vincent Slaughter | Vincent Slaughter |
| Maria Del Carmen Parro Cano | |
| Dr. Paul Bloomberg | Dr. Paul Bloomberg |
| Anashay Wright |
It’s worse than it looks. Ms. Wright was added as a board member on July 28, 2022 along with Shirley Irizarry, On October 3, after two months on the board, Ms. Irizarry was apparently dropped from the board and hired for a staff position as National Organizing Director West Region (according to a Twitter post; she is not on the October 12 website). Mr. Soriano, Mr. Slaughter, Ms. Del Carmen Parro Cano, Dr. Paul Bloomberg, and Vivett Dukes were all added to the board on July 28, 2021. Now Mr. Soriano, Ms. Del Carmen Parro Cano, and Vivett Dukes are all gone. That’s peculiar since Mr. Soriano is supposed to act as president until 2026.
There were three original board members. Mr. Cunningham, Bibb Hubbard (connected to the Gates Foundation), Gerard Robinson (a possible proxy for Charles Koch), and Dan Weisberg. Except for Mr. Cunningham they’re all gone, most within a year of NPU’s launch.
Then there’s the fact that NPU has two boards of directors, the one on the website for public consumption and the one on file with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Corporations Division, where NPU is incorporated. Currently NPU lists a board with the Secretary that consists of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Soriano, Mr. Slaughter, Ms. Del Carmen Parro Cano, Dr. Paul Bloomberg—and Keri Rodrigues and Tim Langan, also identified with the Secretary as president and treasurer, respectively. So far as is known neither Ms. Rodrigues nor Mr. Langan have ever appeared on the website as directors. On the original corporate filings the board was listed as Ms. Rodrigues, Mr. Langan, and Alma Marquez. Ms. Marquez was also on the website as a co-founder and elected treasurer but NPU listed Jennifer Rego as treasurer with the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Ms. Rego disappeared. Ms. Marquez disappeared and Mr. Langan is treasurer. Mr. Langan and Ms. Rodrigues are married. Their compensation from NPU when combined with another Walton family operation named Massachusetts Parents United was $626,777 in 2020 which appears to be wildly out of line with industry standards. But when you’ve replaced the treasurer with . . .
Our Leadership, September 17, 2022
From NPU’s webpage:
Keri Rodrigues Co-founder, Founding President
Tim Langan Chief Operating Officer
Marisol Quevedo Rerucha Chief of Strategy
Tafshier Cosby Director of Organizing
Vivett Dukes Deputy Director of Organizing
Christina Laster* Director of Policy and legislation
Colleen Cook Director of partnerships
Bernita Bradley Director of parent Voice and Outreach
Maritza Guridy Deputy Director of Parent Voice and Outreach
Our Leadership, October 12, 2022
Keri Rodrigues Co-founder, Founding President
Tim Langan Chief Operating Officer
Tafshier Crosby Senior Director for the NPU Center of Organizing
Bernita Bradley Director of NPU Center
Maritza Guridy Deputy Director of Parent Voice and Outreach
Shea Mackin Senior Adviser
Ariel Taylor Smith Senior Director of the NPU Center for Policy and Action
Somewhere between September 17 and October 13, 2022, Ms. Rerucha, Ms. Dukes (a former board member), Ms. Laster, and Ms. Cooks were dropped. Ms. Mackin moved from Texas delegate to leadership, and Ms. Smith was added.
Did these individuals lose their jobs? Or are they just for some reason dropped from the webpage? The latter seems unlikely since several of them were featured in NPU outreach. But with dark money operations like NPU, nothing is ever what it seems.
Find Your Delegate
On the NPU webpage for September 17, 2022 there was a button to click to “Find Your Delegate.” 
If you did that and cast about here is what you’d find:
| September 17, 2022 Delegates | Region | October 13, 2022 Delegates |
| Christy Joyce | Midwest | ? |
| Bernita Bradley | Midwest | ? |
| Kelley Williams-Bolar | Midwest | ? |
| Tanya Draughn | Midwest | ? |
| Yahaira Lopez | Northeast | ? |
| Jamilah Muhammad | Northeast | ? |
| Rhashonna Cosby | Northeast | ? |
| Ashara Baker | Northeast | ? |
| Debra Garrett | Northeast | ? |
| Renee Brown | Northeast | ? |
| Nehemiah Frank | Southern | ? |
| Christin White-Kaiser | Southern | ? |
| Wendy Gonzalez-Neal | Texas | ? |
| Soangelis Rivera | US Virgin Islands/Puerto Rico | ? |
On the webpage for October 13, 2022 the Find Your Delegate button is missing 
and so are the fourteen delegates except for Ms. Mackin who has moved onto Leadership. (I hope she’s seen the movie The Death of Stalin). The role of the delegates was never clear publicly and at least some were chosen by NPU after it sought nominees on Twitter. It’s hard to say who the delegates really represented. Now they all seem to have . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah. Disappeared.
Staff
Here’s something else. NPU now lists eight people as “Staff.” Four of them are from Minnesota. As I said, national?
It’s risky to assume anything when it comes to NPU but I’m going to risk the assumption that some, maybe most, of the disappeared people were being compensated. Titles like “Chief of Strategy” and “Deputy Director of Organizing” suggest compensation. Now they’re gone. In 2020, across the Walton operations NPU and MPU, Ms. Rodrigues and Mr. Langan compensated themselves $626,777. You know who else is still getting paid? The international communications firm Mercury LLC which handles public relations for NPU. Who else? Prominent Republican and Walton family pollster Echelon Insights. Mercury and Echelon are crucial to marketing NPU, and NPU is a marketing tool toward the Waltons and Charles Koch’s end of privatizing public schools.
What a mess. Maybe the major investors need to take a hard look at their creation. How about it Walton Family Foundation, Vela Education Fund (a joint venture between the Waltons and Charles Koch), Chan-Zuckerberg, and on and on among billionaire privatizers?
Anyone now out of a job has some extra time. Feel free to email or DM me.
Addendum 10/14/2022
I’m adding a list of people who have disappeared from the website or Secretary of State’s records. Caution: This only means they’ve disappeared from the website. It’s possible any of them are still involved somehow. But, they were once prominent enough to be featured on the website, now they’re gone. If you’re on this list and I’ve got it wrong, let me know and I’ll correct the record. With that, a list of “The Disappeared”:
Alma Marquez Board, Co-founder, Treasurer
Bibb Hubbard Board
Gerard Robinson Board
Dan Weisberg Board
Shirley Irizarry Board
Arthur Soriano Board
Maria Del Carmen Parro Cano Board, Leadership
Vivett Dukes Board, Leadership
Marisol Quevada Rerucha Leadership
Janet Rego Treasurer
Jada Bolar Leadership
Colleen Cook Leadership
Christina Laster* Leadership
Colleen Cook Leadership
Christy Joyce Delegate
Kelley Williams-Bolar Delegate
Tanya Durham Delegate
Yahaira Lopez Delegate
Jamilah Muhammad Delegate
Rhashonna Cosby Delegate
Debra Garrett Delegate
Reneee Brown Delegate
Nehemiah Frank Delegate
Christin White Kaiser Delegate
Wendy Gonzalez-Neal Delegate
Soangelis Rivera Delegate
- *I understand that Ms. Laster does not feel she “disappeared” from NPU and asserts she was “was not involved in any mismanagement charged in the article.” 10/27/2022.
In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. . . . Publicity is the very soul of justice.”—Jeremy Bentham
Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]