A Fond Farewell to a Dedicated Public Servant

When it comes to school boards, it’s difficult to do better than a master’s degree-level educator with decades of executive experience focused on institutional organization and the way that systems can be improved to operate more efficiently. I didn’t agree with every single one of Carpenter’s votes, but I never questioned her motivations and thoroughly enjoyed our discourse. As a columnist, I always appreciated the absence of political talking points and her willingness to listen and consider differing opinions, while eagerly engaging in debate over the pros and cons of both sides of an issue. In most cases, I came out of the conversation much better informed on the subject at hand.

Carpenter moved to Manatee County after retiring as Executive Director of the New Hampshire Children’s Trust, where she focused on child abuse prevention. In "retirement" she showed the same community-oriented focus that had marked her professional career, becoming a board member for Take Stock in Children, where she lead the organization’s transition from an arm of the Manatee Education Foundation to a separate nonprofit entity, later becoming a mentor in the program herself.

Her up close relationship with the school district convinced her that much could be improved if the children of Manatee County were to get the very best education possible, and running for the board seemed the only effective way to serve that cause. Carpenter was elected in 2010 amid a period of declining public trust and employee morale, giving the board both a political outsider and a much needed injection of serious intellectual might. At that time, the district's administration had become deeply politicized and its higher ranks filled with loyal partisans, many of whom had suspect credentials. Education activists and good government watchdogs held deep suspicions that the rosy financials being reported to the board and public were suspect at best, fraudulent at worst.

Over the next 18 months, Carpenter would become a major thorn in the side of a good-old-boy system that had long had its way with little public interest or inspection. Together with fellow board member Julie Aranibar, who was also elected as an outsider in 2010, Carpenter doggedly pursued answers to questions that the public had made, only to be ignored or given the runaround. This didn't exactly endear her to the powers that be. She was consistently accused of micromanaging and branded a troublemaker by those who had benefited from the status quo for so long.

Carpenter and Aranibar were often on the losing end of important 3-2 votes, but their collective insistence on calling the administration to the carpet and echoing the concerns of a small group of active citizens–many of whom had served on a recently disbanded citizen budget committee that had been getting too close to the truth–helped make the charade much more difficult to conceal. For her efforts, Carpenter was harassed to no end. Her labors were finally validated, however, when former Superintendent Tim McGonegal finally went before the public in September of 2012 and admitted that he and his staff had in fact been cooking the books, so to speak, presenting knowingly false information in reports that deliberately made a multi-million dollar shortfall appear as a multi-million dollar surplus.

It should be noted that on the very day that McGonegal, who had previously announced he'd soon be retiring early for "health reasons,“ went public with the deceit, the Bradenton Herald had run a scathing op/ed that not only scorned Carpenter and Aranibar but went so far as to suggest that their meddling may have chased a worthy administrator into retirement to the detriment of the district. Needless to say, the exposure of that scheme instead kept the district from going completely over the cliff fiscally, leading to a multi-year recovery effort in which the budget was finally brought back to balance and the required reserves restored.

Carpenter was elected chair during the board's darkest hours and had the credibility to help restore public trust and begin to right the ship. Few people knew that just six months into that first term, she had been diagnosed with cancer, waging those exhaustive battles while undergoing chemotherapy. Those who had any idea what Carpenter had been through were shocked when she dutifully agreed to run for reelection in 2014. She clearly didn't take to the nastiness of politics, the absence of integrity among the majority of its players, or the mean-spirited way that the most aggressive in-fighters would attack their opponents. However, she'd be damned if she were to let those same bottom feeders replace her seat with another stooge, eager to clear away space at the trough at the expense of a quality education for the children of our community.

Just because she was adverse to the gutter, that didn't mean Carpenter was going to run from a fight. It's not hard to imagine where that grit came from. Neither of her parents were able to attend high school. Her father, a union railway worker, always championed education, however, and insisted that she would get as much as possible in order to attain a better life. Carpenter came of age in an era during which women had very few options compared to their male counterparts, but that never stopped her from excelling to the highest levels, even as she worked to put two daughters through college as a single mother. Suffice it to say, Karen Carpenter was a strong, independent woman long before that phrase had been invented.

Never one to sit still, Carpenter embarked on other efforts to aid the community, including leading the Bradenton Kiwanis' Christmas in August program for the past several years. If you're seeing a pattern of dedicating one's time to ensuring that children who do not start off with many advantages might enjoy a more level playing field, then you're starting to understand what Miss Carpenter has always been about.

"Poverty is not a precursor for failure," Carpenter once told me. "We’ve seen that these kids can learn, that they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps if you will, but they need support. They need people who will help steer them in the right direction, mentors and such. I’ve learned from my experience that these people are out there. We’re blessed with an awful lot of them right here in our community. Often, it’s just a matter of having the organizations and resources in place to put them together."

As a mother, Carpenter magnified her impact on the world by raising two fiercely intelligent and equally engaged daughters. One went into education, becoming a teacher, then the principal/director for an ESL charter school, before moving on to a career as an educational consultant to inner city schools with deeply-challenged demographics in places like Memphis and Baltimore. The second daughter followed her mother’s other passion into a career in nonprofit management. Like their mom, both have master’s degrees and are committed to a life of working to improve their communities.

Over the past two years, however, Carpenter has seemed rather exhausted on the dais, and not in a mere physical sense. Her trademark smile, which is bright enough to light up a dark room, isn't worn nearly as often as it once was–not in that arena anyway. She often seems to wear the look of a woman who has fought the good fight for long enough and is smart enough to know the limitations of public service. Having seen her around her children and grandchildren, it is obvious why she decided that home was where her time and energy would best be spent in these coming years. Nonetheless, she remains optimistic.

"This school district needs to continue to improve," she told me shortly after announcing her retirement. "And I’m hopeful that it will. It always needs to be about fiscal responsibility, strong organizational management and supporting students and teachers. That’s it. I really believe the majority of people involved want that, but it’s not always easy to get there. The community has to remain vigilant and hold the board and administrators accountable."