About Dr. Brandon Utter

Brandon Utter lives in Skokie with his three children and partner. In the ‘24-25 school year, he has a 3rd grader and a Kindergartner at Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies.

Brandon has been engaged with the School Board and School District since becoming a D65 parent and throughout the tumult surrounding Bessie Rhodes. He has attended and spoken at multiple meetings, is a Board Member on the Bessie Rhodes PTA, and is involved with the Bessie Rhodes caregiver community. Brandon is familiar with the key players in the District, the roles and responsibilities of the School Board, and the ways in which the Board and District administration interface. After watching the current Board and district administration repeatedly show a poor understanding of the data surrounding Bessie Rhodes and their refusal to engage in meaningful community outreach, Brandon decided to run for the School Board. Brandon is committed to using transparent, high quality data and analytic approaches to generate high quality decisions/recommendations impacting all of the children, teachers and support staff of District 65.

Brandon is from Salina Kansas and graduated with his PharmD from the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy in 2011. He then pursued post-graduate pharmacy residency training in San Antonio Texas and Buffalo New York where he specialized in psychotropic medications and their use in the Veteran population.

He works during the day as a Clinical Pharmacist Practitioner for the Department of Veteran Affairs. In this role he sees military Veteran Mental Health outpatients remotely and functions as a mental health medication manager. He has been in this position since 2021 and before that was working at Lovell VA Health Care Center in a similar role. Prior to these roles, he lived in Denver Colorado and was faculty with the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences where many duties were performed. Most prominently, he was contracted by the State of Colorado Medicaid Program (Health First Colorado) to lead and facilitate the Drug Utilization Review (DUR) Board. The DUR Board consisted of Pharmacists and Physicians and their charge was providing medication use and policy recommendations to the Medicaid Program. The DUR Board meetings were public, open meetings and Brandon served as an ex-officio member preparing technical policy recommendations and medication use criteria for discussion and review by the DUR Board. He worked with an analytic team consisting of a masters level analyst, PhD Pharmacoeconomic faculty, and several similarly qualified clinical staff. Brandon held this role for 4 years and during that time wrote thousands of lines of medication use criteria and worked with his team to develop policy recommendations all the way from raw data to detailed interpretation of findings, to dozens of pragmatic policy recommendations to the Medicaid program. Most all of this policy was accepted by Board and State to aid in regulation of benefits for the 1.4 million Medicaid members in Colorado, while responsibly impacting management to the Medicaid’s 15 billion dollar budget.

Prior to this role, he had worked in a couple of other VA hospital systems in West Palm Beach and Orlando Florida providing mental health medication management services. Additionally, Brandon had the opportunity to lecture at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, Zambia for one year after his partner had won a Fulbright/Fogerty Scholarship to conduct research in Zambia. He lectured to pharmacy, medical, and nursing students and residents in topics of psychopharmacology, pharmacotherapy, and psychopharmacotherapy.

Brandon served in the Kansas Army National Guard from 2002-2011, which he did primarily to pay for his schooling. He deployed in 2005-2006 and served as a combat medic with his unit as they were assigned as a personal security detachment to ambassadors and Iraqi politicians. He separated from the military with an honorable discharge in 2011 to focus on his post-doctoral residency trainings.

Brandon Utter is exited to the opportunity to serve District 65. He truly believes in the families, children, teachers and staff of the district and their desire to improve educational outcomes, financial stability, and dedication to pushing the envelope of excellence for students of all levels of achievement.