Rosie Loeffler-Kemp has been our Clerk for the past year- and-a-half meaning that she shares the private meetings with the Superintendent that determine our Board agendas which have been so controversial since I got elected in 2013. At our Tuesday meeting when three of us kvetched about not getting satisfactory information on the budget beforehand Rosie suggested that our many questions puzzled her because she had been given all the information she needed. Well, of course, some of my colleagues kvetched again after the meeting that Rosie is always cosseted with the powers-that-be getting all the questions she has answered before we meet in committee.
Shortly before the old School Board accused Art Johnston of assault on the Superintendent I had suggested to my new colleague Rosie that we ought to go out for coffee and talk and she was agreeable to this. Needless to say the horrors that followed over the next year put an end to such a meeting. Since Art routed the old Board in Court I’ve never brought the subject up with Rosie again.
Alanna Oswald who has pushed replacing the mulch from the very beginning of her service, even before she was seated, got a thank you note from one of the Lester Park parents who was quite aware that Alanna had spearheaded this soon to be implemented change. The writer asked Alanna to pass thanks onto Art and me as we were given similar credit even though we were more skeptical of the replacement at first. The writer was well aware that Alanna’s motion for the District to get cracking was replaced by a more vague motion written by Rosie. This replacement allowed Rosie to take credit for the change despite her previous deference to Administrative reluctance to make a change. From the thank you:
“I saw Rosie hijack your amendment and if anybody asks we will be certain they know who was really the one pushing this. It takes ALOT for any incumbent in any position to earn my vote for reelection especially this early in their term but you have done it.”
A month earlier after our May school board meeting I helped Marci Stromgren carry out the camera that she faithfully brings to record our meetings. She asked me to wait while she stepped outside the Board room to talk to an administrator in the hallway. She came back hot and bothered because Rosie elbowed her aside because she had a more pressing conversation to take up with the administrator. Marci, no shrinking violet, was taken aback. As she groused about her treatment my friend Tim joined us. I just laughed. All three of us have had Rosie elbow us aside. I told Marcie the story about Rosie’s treatment of Tim and then told her my elbow story. I had been to Homecroft school this spring to read. When I went to one of my rooms at the assigned time Rosie hurried up behind me, elbowed me aside telling me she had to read in the class as she hustled through the door past me. I was dumbstuck. I hung around Homecroft for another hour and read to the class after lunch hour.
Tuesday’s meeting was a long one. At one point Art was speaking at length about the budget and mentioning how his requests for budget information had not been provided to him. That was one of a number of reasons that three of us voted against the 2016-17 budget. He was a little long winded and one of the Board members growing tired of Art thrust her chin out and stared at the ceiling until Art was through.
Art is not the only long winded speaker. I get plenty of chances to pontificate myself. But for me the slowest part of the meeting was listening to Rosie give the report of the Education Committee that she chairs. I began marking every “uh” or “um” that Rosie uttered in groups of five. I didn’t start for a few minutes but before she was through I had marked just short of a hundred of them. I felt a little like a prisoner in solitary confinement marking time on the cell wall.
I wish Rosie had stuck around to hear me read my favorite read out loud book “Me First” about Pinkerton the Pig who always wanted to be first until he met a wise witch. The thank yous I get from school kids often picture her.
