I couldn't believe it.
John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move "Old Business" to the beginning of our meetings.
I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home. That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?
I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil. I was the infamous "rogue" board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, "I've seen kinder things said about murderers."
In fact, I had slipped on to the school board as a write-in candidate, after a stealth, two-day campaign waged only by email.
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