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Kathy Green looks back on 25 years of serving on the school board

 

When Kathy Green was first elected to the Austin Public Schools Board in 1999, there was no intention that it would be long term.

A self-described person who has a passion for involvement, Green wanted to do something that made a positive impact on a district that included her own children.

Twenty-five years later, Green is finally calling it a career with her last school board meeting being a work session on Monday. Her final day as a school board member is Nov. 4, one day before the General Election.

“I didn’t go, ‘hey, this is going to be my career,’” Green said Monday morning before handing in her district-issued laptop later in the afternoon. “It’s just the evolution of what I was able to do with it.

Green officially announced in July that she would be stepping down from her position to spend more time with family with a goal to officially retire on Dec. 31, Green agreed to move the date up to November so that the district could call a special election on Nov. 5.

Dan Zielke and Isabella Krueger are running to determine who will round out the final two years of Green’s current term.

“I think it’s important that we allow people to know of the opportunity and people that would want to step forward,” Green had said at the time.

Now, just a few months later Green is fully able to look back on a career that has allowed her an opportunity to have an impact on at a local level, as well as at the state and national levels.

“If you’re a parent you look at education like what’s best for my kid,” Green said. “In my situation, when I first got involved it was conversations. What about my kids?”

“The more I got into it, it wasn’t just my kids. It was all kids,” she continued. “This is a system. This is made up of all kinds of kids with all kinds of needs and I’ve always been a huge proponent of the individual child.”

While she was elected to her first term in 1999, the journey to a seat on the school board actually began in 1987 with a question of class size. At that point, Green and her husband Peter’s first child was starting kindergarten with a combined class size of 32 students.

It was September and Green said she found it odd and so started with questioning the teacher. Ultimately, her conversations led Green to the superintendent’s office.

In turn, this movement led to other opportunities  down the line including being a co-chair on a referendum committee that was able to pass a school improvement initiative on a third attempt.

“My approach has always been how can I make a difference?” Green said. “What needs to happen in order for something to be accomplished. Also, what needs to happen in order for something to be accomplished?”

Green said that working through the school board was a chance to put goals into action and work with people who had similar goals and passions.

But it wasn’t just the board, it was also work through the committees  that played a part in those efforts.

“The school board was the structure. The policy setting,” she said. “It’s where you get your questions answered.”

During her time, Green and other board members have worked on a variety of efforts that have impacted the district and its students and staff.

Among those board impacts has been guiding a system that approaches the needs of each child and for Green that started with her own time as a student at a south Minneapolis school. It was there that she saw the advantages of off-ramps for students who needed a slightly different approach.

At the same time, she was seeing the opportunities of those off-ramps narrowing.

“All of a sudden it was all kids needed to be proficient in algebra. All kids needed to be proficient in English and the mode of operation during the 90s was if you had a child that was deficient in an area you remediated the weakness rather than further their strengths.”

Now, districts — Austin included — are aware of the advantages of approaching those strengths. Green points to the Pi Academy as being one of those efforts. Similar initiatives are also in place to meet other students where they are as well.

“Now we’ve got a classroom where children in the 1 to 3% have the option of opting into where they are challenged at their level,” Green said. “That’s just a microcosm, but we’re able to do that in other areas, too.”

Another district triumph that resonates with Green is how its incorporated diversity when it really started to blossom in the 2000s.

Green remembered seeing it before that, however, as soccer began to take hold in the 1990s, when the Green family became heavily involved. Since then, Green said the diversity of the APS district has become a strength to Austin.

“I think schools have been such an integral part of welcoming,” she said. “Austin has done it right. It’s done it not only in a passive way with a few immigrants coming in, but in the past five, six years we’ll get an excess of students of a particular population. We’ve become a district that can assimilate large numbers in a relatively short amount of time.”

That’s not to say it hasn’t been challenging at times and one of the biggest challenges Green across the nation is the politicization of school boards.

“We have to have kids that are able to read. Do fundamental mathematics,” Green said. “We can have kids that have writing and communication skills. We don’t necessarily need to be teaching kids about all things political.”

But overall, Green has seen over her time a district board that has been able to sit down and find the answers that are best for the district.

It has been a point of pride that has stood out to Green over her two decades on the board, which have included stints as board chair.

“I think one thing, and this goes over the course of several boards, is the real desire to find solutions and once solutions are brought to us from any number of avenues, I have seen so often work on how are we going to make this happen?”

In a testament to that, Green said the district has been able to avoid some of the pitfalls that other districts have fallen into: the need to cut staff and cut programming among them.

Once her time on the board is done, Green said that travel is on the docket for her and Peter that will also include that desire to spend more time with family.

Boosting her decision to call it a career is what she sees as the rewarding aspects of her time on the board filled with prideful moments and accomplishments.

“Being a part of the enrichment these kids have experienced has been fantastic,” she said.