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Girls gone missing
New School Board will be all men for first time in a generation
By MARY EVA CASSADA
Special to The News & Record
Come January, for the first time in almost 25 years, the Halifax County
School Board will have no women.
Maybe this is irrelevant after all, who can recall the last time the
Trustees faced a gender issue?
Or maybe, in the era of Hillary and Condi and, farther afield, Benazir
Bhutto, it's a bit strange, especially given that women are a vital
presence in education, whether as classroom teachers, principals, PTO
volunteers or household checkers-of-homework. Nationwide, 40 percent of
school board members are women. Not to mention 53 percent of the
county's population.
Eighty-three percent of the school's total workforce is women. (How did
Deputy Superintendent Larry Clark track down that figure
instantaneously? The Central Office just last month sent out info for
Breast Cancer Awareness.) Indeed, the vast majority of Halifax teachers
are women; some schools have only a lone man on their instructional
staff.
In the Central Office, the hierarchy is male-dominated the top three
jobs are filled by men but women round out a plethora of other
supervisory posts.
Robin Mahan, secretary to the superintendent, said the last time the
county board was all guys was April 1983. (Prior to 1992, the then-city
of South Boston had its own board, and it was last all-male in June
1986.)
The current Board boasts three women, an all-time estrogen high, but
two are stepping down and the other was defeated in her re-election
campaign.
Education is, by and large, a woman's sphere but, again, is Trustee
gender relevant?
Personhood first
Many of the decisions in her four-year tenure were so cut-and-dried,
mandated by state or federal oversight or so structured that being a
female didn't really make a difference, said Trustee Sandra Rister,
who steps off in a few weeks.
If anything, Rister said, it was her career in education as a school
librarian that informed her decision-making, especially regarding
discipline cases, when she could divine from her experience what was
really going on. Her XX chromosomes made her neither softer nor harder
on the problem, but her school background helped her hone in on the
crux of problems, she said.
I grew up in the ë60s and I've always just tried to be a person and
not a female,' said Rister.
Trustee Nancylee Bagwell also lamented the loss of female
representation.
I do think you need good people, period. But in this instance, I do
think the female influence has an impact, said Bagwell.
She and her female colleagues sometimes took a little more nurturing
stance, she said, quipping that the others might shoot me if I said
that.
Bagwell was a radio station general manager, and eventually an owner,
back in the 1970s and 1980s when women were not as commonly bosses, and
she still smarts recalling some of the resentment flung her way. But
did she encounter that in local school politics, and does Halifax hold
women down?
I really don't think so, she emphasized. Otherwise, she wouldn't have
has such a very positive experience on the board.
Who's got time?
Trustee Kelly Hill, who like Bagwell did not file for re-election, said
working women are reluctant to seek the job because they are hampered
by the infamous second shift of domestic chores and caregiving.
If I had to guess, she said, that's where the problem lies. Hill
herself is married with a preschooler, an out-of-town pediatric nursing
job and responsibilities for an aging grandmother.
There are so many roles and we want to do them all well, Hill said.
But if her explanation resonates as logical, consider neighboring
Mecklenburg County, where women soon will be a School Board majority,
five of nine. Among the many women candidates were retired educators
and an elementary PTO president.
Clark, the deputy superintendent, noted that women are rising among the
supervisory ranks: Danville, Henry, Charlotte and Mecklenburg counties
have, or have recently had, women superintendents.
A woman's place
Feminists and others who'd like to see more activism have long lamented
the dearth of females in elected offices, but on a School Board, it
seems especially odd given women's traditional close association with
children and, by extension, education.
I do find it surprising that there are no females on your school
board, wrote Dr. Kristen Goss, assistant professor of public policy
studies and political science at Duke University, in an e-mail. Goss
studies why people do (or don't) participate in political life and how
their participation (or non-participation) affects policymaking.
Traditionally, women have been more plentiful on school boards than in
other political institutions, such as state legislatures or certainly
congress. Even before national suffrage, many states and localities
allowed women to vote in school board elections. And female politicians
have traditionally used the school board as a launching pad for higher
office, she continued.
So: Good for women, building political capital in the school board
trenches. But what about the benefit for schools or for other women?
The stereotype hints that a pink-tinged school board might mean added
concern for the predominately female faculty, for female students, or
maybe even the assurance of civility.
Not so fast, cautioned Dr. Jesse Donahue at Saginaw Valley State
University, who has studied precisely this situation. Donahue wrote in
an e-mail, [W}omen who sit on school committees Ö are not
significantly more likely to work on policies that benefit girls in
education for example. Thus, it may be that having an all-male school
committee will create the same kinds of policies that a mixed or
all-female school committee would create.
Translation: Skirt, pants. Makes no difference when it comes to local ñ
emphasis on local ñ elected office.
Donahue's work on the lower levels of politics counters many studies of
female elites in Congress and state legislatures suggesting that women
at the top levels ñ emphasis on top levels do, in fact, come aboard
armed with different interests, agendas and operating styles than the
menfolk.
We know that it matters for women, children, and families that women
are elected to state and national offices because women members of
congress, for example, are more likely than their male colleagues to
champion policies that help other women. Take, for example, the Family
Medical Leave Act that was championed by Pat Schroeder [of] Colorado,
said Donahue.
But the title of one of Donahoe's journal articles about gender on
community school boards?
It Doesn't Matter.