Back to School! with Dr. Sumera Rashid and Mr. Jon Pepper

So Mr. Pepper, you, John, you're finishing up your first year.

You're going into the final quarter of the first year.

What is something that has surprised you about being on the school board?

I think one of the biggest things that surprises me, more than the amount of work, it really is a good 20, 30 hours a week of work that, you know, we're putting in between preparing for meetings and responding to constituent emails and having our meetings and making those contacts in the community.

I think one of the things that surprises me is the limitations on the power of a school board member.

So I don't have a magic wand, right? When you run in an election you're like, "Oh, I wanna change this and I wanna change, change that," and suddenly you realize to even get something brought up to the entire school board either has to come out of committee or it takes three members to bring it to the agenda.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's, there's definitely a lot of hurdles.

And it's not a bad thing, right? Government bureaucracy is at times slow and efficient, but it's done that for a good reason so people can't make changes willy-nilly to systems.

And so for me, there's a lot of things I wanna get done.

Mm-hmm.

Figuring out what's the best way to get things done and biding my time on things.

One of the things that I'm very passionate about is the school zones, right? I'd love to work on, on the rezoning, but we're not touching rezoning till the fall or the spring.

So it's just coming to terms that I don't have this magic wand to solve everybody's problems as much as I want to solve everybody's problems and make everybody happy.

I can't always do it because of the constraints of policy, because of the constraints of bureaucracy.

That's been my biggest learning curve, I think, as a school board member.

Dr. Rashid, or can I call you Sumaira?

No, call me Sumaira, please.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, please.

I'm just making sure.

Come on.

So Sumaira, you are entering the last year of your term.

Yes.