Glad to Have Served, Glad to Have Stepped Down

Can it have been six months since I stepped down from serving on the Philadelphia Board of Education?  I am so honored that Mayor Kenney tapped me to be one of the initial nine Philadelphians to serve on the newly locally appointed governance board for the School District of Philadelphia, and so glad to have served alongside eight of the most good-hearted and dedicated people you could possibly find.  

I learned so much from the experience.  It was quite a thing to carry the responsibilities of the position, whether the sheer scale, the complexity, the never-ending challenges, or the very public-facing nature of it all.  It was often not easy and at times it was very painful, but I remain deeply grateful for every moment and every decision and every interaction.  I'm thankful for everybody I met through the process - staff, students, parents, advocates - all of whom are precious souls trying to do their best, and all of us want the same thing, which is for our kids to be safe and to succeed.  

I will reserve for private discussion any commentary on lessons learned throughout my tenure or on current issues.  But I will say that, when I was a public official, I deeply appreciated the incisive reporting provided by our star journalists in the local education space here in Philadelphia.  What an important and grave role they play in this whole process, and how tireless and enthusiastic was their effort in fulfilling that role.  We all benefit from the transparency and access made possible by their articles and tweets.

I will forever be glad I said yes to the opportunity.  But I am equally glad to have stepped down when I did.  Being president of a consulting firm and being a parent of three kids is literally more than two full-time jobs, so adding the time commitment and emotional burden of being a school board member was something I knew I could only do well for a short season before exiting to let others carry the torch.  

I recall the first Thursday after I officially stepped down, after new school board members had been sworn in.  I immediately fell right back into the same routines that governed my life three years prior.  A lot of my clients are looking for their reports by end of week, so Thursdays are critical days in the office to get stuff done and shipped.  That Thursday was, like many days, a whirlwind of meeting after meeting, using the precious spaces in between for longform content generation and internal check-ins with team members, all with an eye on the clock to be responsible to impending deadlines.

When 5 o'clock hit, I raced over to where Asher was doing remote kindergarten to pick him, got him settled at home, and then went back to work.  Then dinner, then more work.  Then bedtime stories, then still more work.  At around 9 o'clock, right before I was about to get into bed to read and then fall asleep, I decided to check on Twitter feed one last time.  At the top of my feed were a series of live-tweets from the Inquirer's incomparable education reporter, Kristen Graham, the last one noting the beginning of the public speaker portion of the meeting.  

"Oh yes, it's Thursday night, which means there is a school board meeting tonight!  And judging by the tweets, that meeting looks to be going on for at least another couple of hours!  Oh my!  Good thing I'm going to bed now!"  

Part of me misses those meetings and all of the engagement that went into them.  We're talking about our kids here, and I had an extraordinary vantage point from which to help figure out how to do right by them.  I commend anyone who is serving in this capacity or wants to.  Do it for the kids, and I will cheer you on.  Even if we may quibble about the little things or even the big things, I salute you for being on the field, the most important field of them all, which is that our kids are being taken care of.  

But another part of me is so, so glad to be able to, after a long day of work, go to bed at a reasonable hour on a Thursday night.  I'm glad to have served.  But I'm glad to have stepped down.