Lin Howe School, next door to School District headquarters on Irving Place, is the place to be tonight at 6 for the snappiest and happiest School Board meeting in at least two years.
Shouldn’t last more than an hour, highlighted by election of officers.
The 6 o’clock hour will mark one of those rare intersections in time:
All 13 — that is correct — of the city’s elected officials will be in the same room, even if this peculiar conjunction only lasts for minutes.
In addition to the five members of the City Council, invited for ritualistic purposes, the five veteran members of the School Board will be joined by three freshly elected members.
They are Kathy Paspalis, Prof. Patricia Siever and Karlo Silbiger, three diverse personalities who will supplant three Board members who chose not to run for a third term:
Dr. Dana Russell, Jessica Beagles-Roos and Saundra Davis, who are the story of the day.
Just as Prof. Siever, Mr. Silbiger and Ms. Paspalis hail from three different streams of life, so did the retirees, essentially eight years ago this evening.
It was true then and now that their personalities and approaches to problem-solving scarcely could have been more different.
They were separate forces when they came in, but they have been together for so long that the tendency is to lump them together. They became a team.
A pity.
Each made a deep and distinct imprint.
Reporters agreed that Ms. Davis was the most interesting of the trio.
She was the champion battler. She did not even wait until the Earl Scheib paint job dried on her name tag to put her hands together and dive, with ringing vigor, into the first pile and every cluster thereafter.
What learning curve? For a mother of eight, what’s to wait for. Patience is for doctors or dentists, not eager new School Board members. Her stand on every issue was as clear as high noon as the Board waded through scorching disputes such as whether to admit Ladera Heights students and the amount of health insurance that was properly due to members.
What Middle Really Means
In personalities and style, Dr. Russell, the dentist, was a middle-of-the-roader, compared to Ms. Davis’s stentorian approach and Ms. Beagles-Roos’s taciturnity.
The mere mention of middle in the political universe frequently implies softness, a mistake in Dr. Russell’s case. He was a clear-eyed professional who faithfully conducted his research, came to meetings thoroughly prepared, was strong in his opinions and detailed in his reasoning.
In the instant of Ms. Davis and Dr. Russell, the eight-year consensus is that they rewarded supporters by performing exactly as voters intended.
Which leaves the intriguing Ms. Beagles-Roos.
She was saved until the end because her supporters have known that there is a sparkling proponent of certain views and opponent of others trying to get out.
Every day of both four-year terms, in public, the shy Ms. Beagles-Roos has hewed to a characterization some voters would say is ideal for a politician:
The amazingly disciplined Ms. Beagles-Roos was a woman of the fewest words.
She never uttered two when one, especially a single-syllable word, would suffice. Frequently it did.
And then, they were gone, into the night.
