Meet your Candidates for West Plains V-II School Board
Tue, 03/17/2026 - 3:58pm
admin
By:
Amanda Mendez, publisher
This year’s election for West Plains R-VII school board is a five-way race for three seats. Incumbents Reid Grigsby and Jodi Purgason have filed for re-election. Sitting board member Christena Silvey Coleman is not seeking reelection. Former school board president with 36 years of service on this board, Jim Thompson, is seeking reelection, and there are two newcomers to board elections in this race: Ashton Atlas and Jim Laughary. Voters will choose three candidates on the April 7 ballot, and the three candidates with the highest number of votes overall will win the seats.
Howell County News sat down for an in-person interview with each of the candidates last week, and here’s what we learned. We asked each candidate the same questions. Those answers, and the answer to a unique question posed to each candidate, are linked below.
The Candidates
Ashton Atlas (click candidate name for full interview) graduated from West Plains High School in 2017. She is college educated and is currently enrolled in two self-paced master’s programs. Her career has been mostly in public service, and she currently works for Howell County Probation & Parole. Her last name was changed from VonAllmen to Atlas in 2025.
Reid Grigsby, (click candidate name for full interview), incumbent, has lived in West Plains since the 70s and is an alumnus of the high school. He has owned and operated his family’s downtown business, Buro, since 2017. Grigsby is also a college graduate and has had two children graduate as Zizzers. His mother recently retired from teaching art in the district.
Jim Laughary (click candidate name for full interview) began a thirty-year career in education at West Plains schools in 1991. For nine years, he was a math teacher and coach, but was promoted to assistant principal, and then principal, of the high school. He spent ten years as administrator of the school’s CTE facility, then called SCCC. After a brief return to the classroom under critical shortage conditions, Laughary is now twice-retired and working part-time as a 911 dispatcher for Howell County. His four children attended West Plains Schools.
Jodi Purgason (click candidate name for full interview) has three children currently enrolled in the district. She is from West Plains, and “barely graduated” from high school, she said, referring to a past that she has “grown from.” She coaches youth sports and is a licensed real estate agent. This would be her second term on the school board.
Jim Thompson (click candidate name for full interview) was a long-serving board member in WP R-7 until two votes separated him from continued service on the board. Prior to that election, he served for 36 years. A 1969 graduate of West Plains High School, he has held many jobs in the community since 1975, eventually retiring as an avionics technician from Air Evac. His three children graduated from the district, and he has one grandson in the elementary school.
CORRECTION: The originally published version of this article incorrectly stated that candidate Laughary was in the classroom for "most" of his career, and that he led SCCC for two years. He was in the classroom for nine years as a math teacher and coach, and was at SCCC for ten years.