“Because, remember, [I was a] parent, advocate, organizer [and then] politician. Those are very different mindsets. Very different. And I even struggled with that in the beginning because typically you look at what is wrong. Like in the business world – well, what’s wrong? How do we need to fix it? And politics is more, OK, this is what it is. This is what the policy says. How do we fix it? Or what is that win-win? Mike Poore talks about the win-win strategy, and he had to sell me on the win-win strategy.” How much does what happened at Central High in 1957 affect what happens now? “You know, 1957, if we look at our logo, the book with this torch, those nine stars represent the Little Rock Nine. And being a member of the board that was endorsed by members of the Little Rock Nine, Dr. Terrence Roberts, to be exact, and having the support of others, that means a lot to have him say, ‘passing of a torch.’ ... “They went through a lot, and sometimes we see it sanitized. Sometimes we hear the history, and it’s sanitized. Sometimes we get the real history of what happened. But talking to them, it doesn’t even compare with what they had to go through and the tenacity they had. And so in that spirit, I carry part of that because just like myself and my colleagues, we stand on those shoulders.”
When it comes to your district, everything that’s reported is typically either bad or big, whereas other school districts, it’s more about who’s winning on Friday night and the things that happen in the classroom. How do you get the message out about your district? “You know, it goes back to mindset. It goes back to those that report, the media. It’s like the ‘theys’ – you know, where ‘They did it.’ Who did it? They did it. They have to be committed to reporting all the things that happen in our district. “Our school board, we have not been in the news for anything negative. Our school board, we run effective meetings. They can say they’re long, but you know what? They’re effective. We are getting things done. People referenced the longer meetings in the beginning, but they don’t reference the several monthly business meetings we’ve had that have not been anywhere near those lengths of time. “And then as far as the ‘bad,’ just to use that word, the minuses, if you will, of the district, they need to balance that. We think about McClellan [High], and McClellan was always in the news for the bad things, right? … But they never talked about the tenacity of those students, the tenacity of the community, the tenacity of those educators, or else how many Bill Gates scholars came out of that school. They’ve rarely talked
about the social-emotional barriers that children had to get over. … “This is a new board, right? All of us, we have to learn at the same time, but then we came into a system, an engine, that was full speed ahead. Each of us had to learn how to be a board member, and we had the opportunity to learn in the public eye under scrutiny. I’m very proud of my colleagues as well as myself for not breaking under the level of pressure that we get that’s warranted and unwarranted. Because we don’t have the autonomy to talk one on one with each other. Everything has to be played out in public. I don’t know if people really understand what it’s like to be a new body in a 150-plus-year system. We have to start over, and especially when our policies were cut to the bare bones where we’ve got to build all those things up, and we’re still in the process of strengthening ourselves to be amazing public servants the way that our community sees us and trusts us to be as they all voted for us. … “I don’t think there’s any other district in the state that has to deal with the many entry points that we have to deal with, but then we do it with honor, grace and dignity because we understand that we took an oath to do that. And we get paid the highest amount possible to do that.” Note: Executive Session is edited for length, style and clarity.
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