Thomas Trask is a retired United States Air Force (USAF) officer, with vast leadership and command experience across a wide variety of business sectors including education, operations, executive corporate leadership, and program administration. Thomas was also an experienced state-licensed public school educator, licensed at both elementary and secondary education levels.
Thomas is a game-changing strategist with an extensive professional career of building top-performing organizations, and leading major educational and operational improvement initiatives across large and complex institutions. He is recognized for his sound judgement, strong decision-making abilities, and a demonstrated willingness to shoulder enormous responsibility under intense pressure. Thomas is a confident relationship builder, experienced at top-tier corporate and senior government levels. Thomas has managed multimillion-dollar annual budgets, supervised multibillion-dollar assets and facilities, and successfully lead thousands of team members across many organizations and a wide variety of professional disciplines. With broad exposure to a wide range of cultures and communities across many assignments throughout the nation and around the world, Thomas intends to bring his unique multidisciplinary and multicultural perspective to the Tanque Verde Unified School District Governing Board team.
Thomas earned a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State in Tempe, AZ, and a master’s degree from National University in La Jolla, CA, and considers himself a life-long learner. During his 20-years of service in the United States Air Force, Thomas commanded a professional technical training school, with a $20M annual budget, and was responsible for the education and professional development of over 900 students and corresponding staff and faculty. He served with distinction as the Multimedia Curriculum Department Chief for Air University, where he leveraged technology to optimize training programs educating 15,000 in-resident students, managed the development and implementation of leadership development curriculum across an $8M cloud-collaborative system with 20,000 remote users. Additionally, Thomas held various other positions throughout his career including: Inspector General Inspection Team Chief for the USAF’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC); Assistant Director of Operations for the United State’s only East Coast space surveillance system; and was a Senior Operations Crew Commander for strategic space systems reporting directly to the President of the United States, and the Secretary of Defense.
Thomas Trask is a father of two young children; one enrolled in the Tanque Verde school district, and the other not yet old enough to attend school. With his extensive background in education, from elementary school through to adult learning, Thomas is passionate about making sure students are receiving the correct curriculum, tailored to the correct learning-level, and presented in a flexible manner that meets the needs of each student’s particular learning style.
As a parent of a school-aged child, Thomas understands the concerns of parents and their desire to ensure their students are taught in a safe environment - physically, emotionally, and philosophically safe - an environment where children are taught to be strong, resilient, independent thinkers; where students are taught how to use reason and logic to think, with their ultimate goal of becoming self-sufficient and productive citizens. Thomas understands that parents are the ultimate decision making authority for their children, and it is the governing board’s responsibility to listen to parents; to create an environment that reflects the desires of the residents of the district; to foster a professional educational environment that demands excellence at every level, transparency in the classroom and the boardroom, integrity and accountability of each team member and student, and a promotes a spirit of continuous growth and improvement; always improving, always learning, always doing our best.