Tom Hutton is the executive director of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP), an association of school districts and county offices of education that authorize charter schools. A long-time ELA member, Tom served as ELA’s Long-Distance, Part-time, Contractual, Interim Executive Director (try fitting that on a business card) from August 2019 to March 2023, through ELA’s transition to a virtual organization and the COVID pandemic. 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. As a law student he had been a co-founder of Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School, a law-themed high school in the District of Columbia. After his return to Hawai’i in 2012 he served as the first executive director of the Hawai’i State Public Charter School Commission and later on the governing board of Wai’alae Elementary Public Charter School in Honolulu. In past lives he has been a frequent speaker, writer, and news media source, as well as an occasional adjunct professor of education law, most recently at Indiana University Bloomington. Tom was educated in public schools in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Colorado, and graduated from Connecticut College. He 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.