JAMESVILLE-DEWITT SCHOOL DISTRICT – During its final meeting of the school year, the Jamesville-DeWitt Board of Education announced to those attending in-person and listening over Zoom that the district’s business administrator, Timothy Decker, has passed away.
Decker, who was 54, had fulfilled that role for J-D since 2009. His death on June 3 stemmed from the rare and fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease he was recently diagnosed with according to a letter Superintendent Peter Smith sent out to district staff.
“Tim was a colleague but also a close personal friend of mine,” Smith said during the board’s June 13 meeting. “I will miss him terribly.”
Calling him a “confidant,” Smith said he appreciated Decker’s smarts and his “odd” yet “tremendous” sense of humor. The superintendent’s earlier letter also recalled the Liverpool resident’s love of professional baseball and hockey and the fact that he was “incredibly proud” of his wife and their three children.
During his time with the district, Decker oversaw renovations to the high school’s auditorium, the installation of new roofs for each of the school buildings, and the capital projects currently underway for the high school and middle school. He also covered all aspects of finance, including the assembling of the annual operating budgets that were approved every year of his tenure.
Additionally, Decker was a leader for non-instructional district operations in the areas of custodial work, food service, maintenance, mechanics and transportation.
J-D has approved an interim business manager, Peter Mahunik, who recently retired from the same position at Fabius-Pompey. He will begin work in July, and the district will “immediately” begin the process to find a permanent replacement.
