Omaha cover feature daughter, Elizabeth, and son, Andrew, were born. Then to Omaha, Neb., “in good part for the better schools,” Joe notes. With two young children and a husband with a job that took him away at all hours, Jean decided she would stay home with her children. In little time, being an at-home mom entailed diving into work with her local parent-teacher organization. Joe says it was a natural fit for her. “She has always been strong-willed but wonderful at listening to others and working together with people to get things done,” he says. “Then, as an ICU nurse, she was working with an immense amount of sophisticated mechanisms. She enjoyed that. I think she was quickly interested in the mechanisms of government.”
g
etting out the vote
Three years after the family arrived in Millard, three positions opened on the Millard
School Board. “There were 13 people running. A full field,” Stothert says. “I didn’t have much money, so I figured we’d have to hit the streets and knock on as many doors as we could. We won by a good bit. We learned right then how important it is to get out and talk to everyone you can.”
She has always been strong-willed but wonderful at listening to others and working together with people to get things done.
-Joe Stothert
That shoe-leather, door-to-door campaigning with her and her supportive family at its core has been the key to her continued success. She served two more terms on the Millard School Board before her election to the Omaha City Council, which, she says, was a logical step. “School boards are very much like city councils,” Stothert says. “You manage multimillion-dollar budgets, you have labor negotiations. It wasn’t much of a leap at all.” During her time on the school board, she suffered her only loss so far in politics: a 2006 www.BestOfOmaha.com
2013 • september/october 199