Laguna Blanca School has named five new members to its Board of Trustees: Ron Berg, Steve Couvillion, Ellen Dierberg Milne, Jane Tsai Weaver and Cliff Wyatt.

One of the key roles of the Board of Trustees is to ensure Laguna Blanca School is accomplishing its mission and upholding its core values of scholarship, character, balance and community. The board works with the head of school to provide counsel and guidance, and serves to ensure that Laguna has adequate financial resources to meet its mission and serve its students.

» Berg is a Los Angeles native and lawyer with a career in real property transactions, business/corporate transactions, and specialized entertainment cases. Berg has served on public and private boards, served as a former City Council member and mayor of Hidden Hills, California, and is currently the president of Ennisbrook Home Owners’ Association in Montecito.

Berg and his wife Marci moved to Santa Barbara six years ago, when their son Mason (’24), began attending Laguna Blanca.

» Couvillion (’92) grew up in Santa Barbara and attended Laguna Blanca. He received his medical degree from Tulane University, then completed residency training in ophthalmology at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami. There he was involved with the initial clinical application of biologic pharmaceuticals for treating age-related macular degeneration.

Couvillion completed his vitreoretinal fellowship at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and accepted a faculty position where he served as chief resident and cirector of ocular trauma. In doing so he helped train ophthalmology residents and vitreoretinal fellows in the latest therapeutic techniques. He is a partner in California Retina Consultants based in Santa Barbara.

His three sons, Michael, James and Thomas, attend Laguna Blanca.

» Milne has a passion for education and entrepreneurship. She owns and oversees Dierberg and Star Lane winery and vineyards in Santa Ynez, and Hermannhof winery and vineyard in Missouri, a microbrewery, and her family-owned bank based in California and Missouri, as well as cattle and ranching operations in Santa Barbara and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Milne is fourth generation owner of First Banks, Inc. where she is vice chair of the board and a member of the charitable impact committee that focuses on next-generation education for those in need in the communities First Bank serves.
 
Milne started Tin Mill Brewing Company in 2006, the only microbrewery in the German town of Hermann, Missouri. She is also a trustee for the endowment of the Living History Farm of Hermann, which demonstrates American farming life in the 1860s.
 
She holds an economics degree from Denison University and Level 2 Wine & Spirits Education Trust certification. Milne was born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, where each of her five children was also born. They now attend USC, Thacher School, and Laguna Blanca.

» Weaver has been in Santa Barbara for seven years and previously lived in the Sacramento region, San Francisco Peninsula, and Los Angeles area. She was most recently the regional director of Bring Me A Book Foundation, a nonprofit early literacy and school readiness organization.

Before that she was a marketing and sales executive at software and business services technology companies, with Oracle Corp., and startups including Treasury Services Corporation and PeopleSupport.

For the past two decades, Weaver has been a board member and advisor to education, literacy, and community-engagement nonprofits, including Teach for America, Capital Public Radio (NPR affiliate), Reading Partners, and Social Venture Partners.

She is the founding president of the Boys Team Charity Santa Barbara, helping to launch the teen boys and family volunteer organization. She is particularly interested in catalyzing connections to build partnerships between education entities, business sector companies, and community programs.

Weaver and her husband Kent have four children, three of them at Laguna: Caden, Elyse and Brandon. She holds a BA in economics from Occidental College, MBA from UCLA Anderson School, and a master’s in public affairs from UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.

»  Wyatt graduated from Laguna Blanca as a lifer in 1985 and went on to UC Berkeley, majoring in genetics. He also spent a year at Christ’s College, Cambridge, studying the natural sciences.

He worked for several years as an analyst in the public finance sector helping state and local governments in the Bay Area and the Northwest. Wyatt then worked for several medical diagnostic companies, Becton Dickinson and Bayer Diagnostics, selling instruments and services.
 
In 1996, he moved back to Santa Barbara to join his father and brother Geof Wyatt (Laguna Blanca ’79) in their family business, Wyatt Technology Corp. (WTC).

Today, Wyatt serves as president of WTC, which manufactures and sells optical instruments for characterizing molecules and nanoparticles. The instruments have been sold in some 40 countries and have been used by most of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.

Wyatt and his wife, Crystal, are raising two children who attend Laguna, Siena and Jake.
 
For more about Laguna Blanca, a not-for-profit EK-12 co-educational, college preparatory day school, visit lagunablanca.org, or call 805.687.2461.