[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]I hadn’t been sitting long in Amy Anderson’s office this supposedly sedentary morning before I felt the uncharacteristic urge to either jump onto a bicycle or take a sudden, and lengthy, walk. Anywhere.
Our visit sprang from a marvelous presentation the principal of Lin Howe School delivered with the unpretentious verve of a mild hurricane at last Tuesday’s out-the-door School Board meeting where people decorated rafters and all other pieces that did not move.
About 9 million people in the 300-person audience were there to argue that teachers should not be cut just because of a state dollar diet.
I am betting the charismatic Ms. Anderson was the only one in the whole room eager to talk about the surging Safe Routes to School program, an international movement. http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/LocalPrograms/saferoutes/saferoutes.htm
She spoke about 13 minutes, which is a day longer than forever when quarters are so snug that you know how many onions the guy on your left shoulder had for dinner and you can estimate within a month the last time the woman on your right said hello to her toothpaste tube. Halitosis could have emptied Council Chambers that night.
Don’t Ask for a Show of Hands
Ms. Anderson, against 299 to 1 odds, was an impressive sales rep for the worthy Safe Routes promotion for the same reason she is winning plaudits as Lin Howe’s principal, her authentic vigor and her bristling enthusiasm.
I refused to let the onions and lack of toothpaste defeat me. Quickly I became caught up in the momentous moment.
In Council Chambers, the speaker at the podium faces the dais, with her back to the audience.
The savvy Ms. Anderson leapfrogged that slender inconvenience.
She constantly involved the crowd by making her whiz-fast speech interactive, pivoting and practically leading the crowd in cheers.
Through her opening, I was thinking, “yeah, yeah,” and then she began to sketch appealing word pictures — how the program started last autumn at Lin Howe and has pleasantly expanded into the good kind of forest fire.
When I contacted Ms. Anderson the next morning to say I wanted to publish her infectious speech, she surprised me. She only had scratched out several notes and had spoken extemporaneously. I can think of 4,000 people just in this town who should study the video of her address.
She wanted to impress several big ticket takeaways, as she phrased it, with her listeners last week. “One was that we received a pretty big amount in (state grant) funding to start this program, about $448,000, and the city is going to match $50,000 of that, ” Ms. Anderson said.
(To be continued)