If you don’t count my first two years on the School Board from 96 to 97 when I was one of two new members my first crack at being in the minority was in the 2000-01 school year. Until this year I thought it was tough back then. Today those years look like a golden age to me.
By that time I was blogging even though that Internet term had barely been invented. I called my work “the school board diary.” Just like now school board members who disagreed with me wished I wouldn’t explain myself and the Board online. I only kept the diary off and on for a couple years. Shortly after I stepped off the school board in 2004 it appeared that all my diary entries had been accidentally deleted. Last year I discovered the Wayback Machine which saves billions of old webpages. It appears I can still access them. Just now I began printing them out to have a paper copy. This is the first of the pages I began with.
We were not a harmonious board in 2000 but at least we were a functioning board. I strongly disagreed with my adversaries. I did not have contempt for them. There was no Kevin Rupp eager to sow seeds of discord to boost his legal service fees.