The Best Job I Ever Had
Well, here we are. This is my last regular public meeting as a member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. For some, this will no doubt come as reason for celebration, while for many others, the loss of an experienced voice for fiscal sanity, core academic excellence, and avoiding flavor-of-the-day programming is a cause of concern. Over the eight years of my service, I have often been asked why I would ever willingly take on such a “thankless” job. Even though I loved the 40 years of work in my business, I have consistently replied to that question that this is the best job I ever had.
As I detailed in my June 27 post at PhilipDerrow.com, public service is an honor, and it should be a temporary one. The framers of our Constitution created a system of government that was premised on the principles that government works best when it is closest to the governed and that elected officials should be citizens first, not career politicians.
When I was first elected, our district faced an unsustainable fiscal time-bomb and a profound lack of focus on core academic excellence. Working in collaboration with my Board colleagues, our outstanding administrators, educators, and staff, we solved both problems. As I wrote in June, “Money doesn’t drive educational outcomes, focus does.”
My experience building my business to more than half a billion dollars and 1400 employees was invaluable to solving the problems of an enterprise with a $75 million annual budget and 700 employees. While the specific challenges of an organization focused on primary and secondary education are different than those in industry, the process for solving them is the same: identify, the organization’s core purpose and focus the right resources there. While children aren’t widgets, the objective evidence is overwhelmingly clear that schools focused on core academic curriculum, including music and the arts, produce better outcomes and opportunities for their students than those that don’t.
These principles have always guided my work, including my determination to keep our students in school where they could see and interact with their teachers and friends during Covid and in keeping our school out of responsibilities that rightly belong to parents. The objective evidence overwhelming supports those judgments.
Having accomplished every objective I promised to voters in each of my two elections, it is time to return to being an engaged citizen. I am fully retired from my business and my wife is finishing her service on the Columbus Metropolitan Library Foundation Board. We look forward to traveling without the need to be back for meetings every couple of weeks and I’ll have even more time to pursue my passions for flying, skiing, furniture-making, and of course, more writing for my PhilipDerrow.com blog.
I am profoundly grateful to all those I’ve worked with these past eight years as I have learned so much from them and they have been invaluable in achieving the goals we set each year. While the Board sets those goals, our educators, staff members, and administrators make it happen for our students every day. I am particularly grateful to have had the good fortune to have hired and worked all these years with Superintendent Michael Sawyers, one of the finest leaders of any organization I have ever known. Little of what we accomplished these past eight years would have happened without his skill in turning policy into actions to produce demonstrable results for kids.
I leave our school in a much better place financially and academically than when I first joined the Board. I am confident my four colleagues here tonight and our new member joining next month will continue to be good stewards of this wonderful school.