Starting my service on the board during covid was a really strange experience. Most of the time, board work is fairly routine, but covid made it anything but routine.

Due to my father’s failing health, among other things, I was extremely careful during covid. My family stayed home and wore masks quite a bit longer than most people in this area. During that time, when we were still being very careful but everything was opening back up, the board decided to remove the masking requirements from the schools.

I was not comfortable with this decision. I argued passionately in favor of waiting, and then I argued for trying it at the high school, where everyone was old enough to be vaccinated, before we lifted the requirements at WLIS and WLES. The corporation physicians (one of whom happens to be my children’s pediatrician, so obviously I trust her) insisted that it was time, and the board voted to remove the mask requirement corporation wide.

Furious, I left the meeting without speaking to anyone, went to my car, and considered pulling my kids out of school entirely. I stayed angry for several days, in spite of other board members’ kind attempts to explain their points of view to me.

Looking back now, I can see that I wasn’t really angry so much as I was afraid.

But guess what – nothing happened. No huge outbreaks of covid happened in the schools, no one died, my own kids didn’t get sick, my dad never even had covid before he died of sepsis due to the gallbladder he had removed in 1986 (bodies are extremely unpredictable). It was fine.

I was wrong.

That’s when I truly understood exactly why we, as board members, need to “get behind” a decision once the board has made it, even if we disagree. As board members, we must believe that the collective intelligence of the seven of us is greater than any one member’s individual intelligence. We must believe that we make better decisions together than we would if we were making those decisions alone. We each bring different educational experiences, different work experiences, different volunteer experiences, different values, and different stories to the board – and that’s the way it should be. That is what is best for all of the students as a whole.

I could have gone online and railed against the decision of the other board members, but what would that have gotten me? Imagine I had… there would have been two factions of parents, the careful and the ready to take off the masks. The careful parents would have been mad at the ready parents, the ready parents would have been frustrated with the careful parents. It might have even spilled over into the kids’ relationships with their friends. Moreover, people would have doubted that the board was capable of running the school district, because we couldn’t agree on this important issue. It could have really divided the community in a time when the community was already hurting. That would have been wrong, and the only thing I hate more than being wrong once is being wrong twice.

Instead I kept my mouth shut, mostly because I was holding my breath, and everything turned out fine. I learned a truly important lesson from that experience.

I’ve chosen to campaign with David Purpura, Maria Koliantz, and George Lyle not because we are aligned on every issue, but because they understand how boards function, and they believe in the collective wisdom of the board as a whole. Hopefully we will never go through anything like Covid again, but if we do, I trust that those individuals will come together with me and the rest of the board to always, always, always do what is best for students… even when we might individually disagree about what is best for students.