A long-time ELA member and an independent consultant to charter school authorizers, school districts, and other education clients, Tom Hutton became ELA’s Interim Executive Director in August of 2019, tasked with helping ELA reposition itself for a bright future. Tom is a former school attorney who served in-house with the National School Boards Association and its Council of School Attorneys and later in private practice in Seattle. He had been a co-founder as a law student of Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School, a law-themed high school in the District of Columbia, and more recently served as the first executive director of the Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission and on the governing board of Wai’alae Elementary Public Charter School in Honolulu. Tom also serves as the executive director of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP), an association of school districts and county offices of education that authorize charter schools. During his career he has been a frequent speaker, writer, and news media source, as well as a sometime adjunct professor of education law, most recently at Indiana University Bloomington. Tom was educated in public schools in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Colorado, went to Connecticut College, holds a graduate certificate in public administration from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and earned his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.