Skip to main content

A Job Well Done



Howard County Board of Education members may not approve of Cindy Vaillancourt, but Howard County voters do. -  - Blair Aimes, HoCo Times (November 5, 2014)

 Today will be Cindy Vaillancourt ‘s last meeting as a member of the Board of Education.  Over her years of service she has moved from being a much-maligned voice of dissent on the board into solid leadership. If there were a special gift for the number of times one has been falsely accused she would win it, hands down. Ms.Vaillancourt’s resolve has been tested, and tested again, by people who wanted to get her out of the way and silence her voice. 

 To lean a bit biblical here, the fiery furnace was no match for Ms. Vaillancourt. She has shown herself to be to be the embodiment of the now familiar quote:

 She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

 None of us will ever fully know the extent of the work Ms. Vaillancourt did while on the Board because she was never an aggressive self-promoter. She made few attempts to put herself in the spotlight at public events. She wasn’t in it for that. She was in it to serve the students, parents, faculty and staff of the Howard County Schools.

 More than anything else, Ms.Vaillancourt has listened. She listened when no one else would. She used all the methods at her disposal to help when others didn’t even bother to respond. She stood up for special needs parents, children sickened by mold, elementary school music programs, victims of bullying and sexual assault, LGBTQ students, faculty and staff who were being unfairly treated in the workplace, and more. 

 She did all this while being the recipient of one false accusation after another. She was often excluded from the inner workings of the Board as a way to circumvent her involvement. She never quit.

 She never gave up on the people of Howard County who needed her.

 In recent years she balanced two open heart surgeries with Board responsibilities. Even when slowed by health issues her priorities have always been responsiveness, transparency, and accountability. Oh, and a deep and respectful sense of human kindness. On good days and bad, that has been Cindy Vaillancourt.

 I hear she is looking forward to retirement where she will enjoy being a first-time grandmother and have the time to cook more. She will also now have to ability to speak on local issue as a private citizen.

 I am looking forward to that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

They Can Wait

This is not a typical Saturday post. That’s because, in my community, it’s not a typical Saturday.  Oakland Mills High School, after years of deferred repair, needs massive renovation. It’s pretty simple: when you don’t fix a problem it gets bigger. The school system itself said the the OMHS school building was  "no longer conducive to learning" back in 2018.  2018 .  But Thursday the Boad of Education voted to push it out of the lineup of important projects which will be given the go-ahead to proceed soonest.  In my opinion it’s a terrible decision and sets a dangerous precedent. To explain, here’s the advocacy letter I sent in support of Oakland Mills High School. I was rather proud of it. I am writing to ask you to proceed with needed renovation at Oakland Mills High School in the most timely and comprehensive manner humanly possible. I have read the letter sent to you by the Oakland Mills Community Association and I am in complete agreement. You are extremel...
1 comment
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more