Brainerd Dispatch: News | Brainerd, Minnesota | Brainerd Lakes Area News on brainerddispatch.com

Home > NEWS >

Friday, October 10, 2008

E-mail

Forums

Kurtzman is picked to fill board vacancy

BRAINERD SCHOOL BOARD

By JODIE TWEED

Staff Writer

She served on the Brainerd School Board as a student representative during her senior year back in 1989.

As of Monday, Molly Kurtzman will officially be back on the school board again.

Kurtzman, 38, was selected Thursday night by the school board to fill the one-year vacancy on the board following Ruth Gmeinder's resignation. She will be installed as a board member at Monday's regular school board meeting.

Kurtzman, a Nisswa stay-at-home mother of three, was one of three finalists interviewed Thursday night, including Tom Haglin and Janet Moran. Four others - Anne Holub, Craig Nathan, Mark Olson and John Raboin - were interviewed by the board Wednesday night. The school board met following the final interviews and voted to offer the position to Kurtzman.

"I'm extremely excited," Kurtzman said, when reached by phone after the meeting. "I'm thrilled. I'm honored. I'm prepared to jump in and work hard and I know that's what it's going to take. It's going to be really fun to start this journey and to be grouped with such awesome candidates like that is an honor."

Molly Kurtzman

Kurtzman grew up in the Brainerd lakes area and graduated from Brainerd High School in 1989. She told board members that when former Superintendent Bob Gross approached her in the hallways her senior year, wanting to speak to her, she was terrified, thinking she was in trouble. Instead, Gross asked her to be a student representative on the school board and she spent the year on the board. Board member Lew Hudson was on the board at the time, she said.

Kurtzman graduated with a double major in politics and communications from Randolph-Macon Women's College in Virginia in 1993 and moved to the Twin Cities. She got a job as an administrative assistant at Northwest Airlines, working her way up to a financial analyst position within six months. She held three different positions during her time with the airline, working in financial planning and analysis until 1999 when she and her husband, Chris, moved to Nisswa. Her husband is president of Bang Printing in Brainerd.

Other than volunteering at Lowell Elementary School, Kurtzman's other community volunteer experience included six years in various positions with the Bible Study Fellowship, an interdenominational group represented by 400 women in the lakes area.

Kurtzman told board members that she has lived here for a long time but never became active in the school district or school issues because she "found every excuse in the book. I was too busy, I had three little kids. It was a challenge to add one more thing to what it was I was already tasked with doing."

But Kurtzman said she realized that her children would become products of the school district, as she was herself, and felt she needed to be involved.

"It was time to either get off the couch and participate or I would have no right to sit back and criticize if I had absolutely nothing to do with the process," Kurtzman explained.

Since January, Kurtzman has served on the school district community budget committee and immersed herself in the district's budgetary process, often meeting with Steve Dickinson, director of business services, to go through the entire budget. Kurtzman said during her interview that the board needs a person with young children on the board to represent those parents in that 25- to 40-year-old age range who, like her, have children starting their educational journey.

Kurtzman told the board that if she were appointed, it would be an investment into her children's lives. She and her husband have three daughters, Libby, 8, a Lowell third-grader; Kate, 6, a kindergartner at the Montessori School of Brainerd; and Hannah, 21 months.

"If at the end of the day, my children see, wow, my mom stepped up. Maybe we had frozen pizza for the third night in a row and our house is trashed but my mom cared enough to step out and be a participant, be willing to take the flack, be willing to learn and grow," Kurtzman said. "I would thoroughly commit to doing this job and all of the good and the bad that may come with it."

All board members expressed what a difficult decision it was to make since each of the candidates were well qualified. They encouraged each of the 15 people who applied for the vacancy to run for a board seat. Longtime board member Lew Hudson took it a step further and told the board that he has decided not to seek re-election to the board next fall when his term is up. There will be three board seats up for re-election, along with a special two-year term to fill out Gmeinder's former position.

The board's top three finalists were Kurtzman, Haglin and Holub.

Hudson said when Kurtzman served on the board while a teen, she was mature beyond her years. He also got to know her on the community budget committee this year.

"She is tenacious, she studies the subject and finds the answers," Hudson said of Kurtzman. "She has a lot of energy and ambition."

JODIE TWEED may be reached at jodie.tweed@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5858.

Note: Comments are not edited and don't represent the views of The Brainerd Dispatch. Please read our posting rules in the terms of service policy. To report a post that may be inappropriate, click the triangle alert icon.