Scarsdale Forum-Thanks Mayra Kirkendall-Rodriguez

Dear Neighbor,

I feel that I need to share my disappointment on the fact that Ms. Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez has resigned from the Scarsdale Forum Board and co-chairing the Education Committee. Ms. Kirkendall-Rodríguez and I have been co-chairs of the Forum’s Education Committee since June 2017.

The Education Committee is the largest, most diverse and most active committee in the Scarsdale Forum. I first met Mayra about three years ago when she joined the Education Committee. As soon as she joined she took on a role of the lead writer of the Committee’s report about improving world language instruction in our Scarsdale Schools and including Mandarin Foreign Language in the Middle School. Her activism and motivation ignite others to collaborate and produce sound reports that included all sorts of different views and positions. In the spring of 2016, she became co-chair of the Education Committee together with Dan Hochvert, who is now our Mayor in the Village of Scarsdale. I must emphasize that both led our committee in writing reports about the school budget, educational and financial objectives for Greenacres, and involving our community in determining education objectives. As a member of the committee with so many members and different views, I also observed the productivity that collaboration started growing more and more.

On April 2017, after a contested election, Mr. Hochvert stepped down as co-chair to become our mayor. I joined as co-chair and Mayra continued her dedication and exemplary work. She led or co-led the design, distribution, and analysis of two education committee surveys to learn from the community on what we want for our schools, following on best practices and using data to support and promote the collaboration among the committee members that contributed to the report. She and I also led our committee in writing a report about the need for the Scarsdale School district to create a long-term financial model and to write a long-term financial plan, which provided an important contribution to our School District and Community in developing and reaffirming a culture of financial planning not only as a government regulation but also as best practices.

In January of this year, she and I also organized a successful event at Village Hall for our Scarsdale Community to come and learn about the school bond in the goal of promoting a dialog and fact sharing among stakeholders of our community; the bond recently passed. If you would have seen the number of emails and conversations among our members writing to each other in our committee, one theme is very clear, she does everything she can to have everyone in that committee included and has often asked people if they want to be the lead writer on any school topic. I consider this aspect so valuable to our community where we have so many volunteers that may not agree with everything but want their voice heard and look for participation and collaboration. Our village cannot heal their differences of opinion without listening to each other and incorporating other people’s views. She understood that and promoted a fair and inclusive practice of leadership in our committee that even extended to the rest of The Scarsdale Forum.

In addition, to be the Co-Chair of the Education Committee, she and her husband work as volunteers and led the design, distribution, and analysis process for the traffic and downtown revitalization surveys and report from The Scarsdale Forum. She also helped the Communications Chair, former Mayor Jon Mark in creating or editing press releases. Since May she has helped edit or write every report that has come out of the Forum from the county, fiscal, municipal, and downtown revitalization committees; she has contributed comments to every draft report from the property revaluation committee.

I have seen so many communications that deal with negative and opinion statements. I believe it is time to begin focusing on what is positive and promoting the healing of our differences by listening and allowing all volunteers and stakeholders to be heard and understood. Data and information should always be the vehicle to convince others and to justify our decisions. In many instances, our emotions can cloud the judgment of some and we can lose the contribution and active participation of dedicated volunteer members of our community such as Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez.

I just felt compelled to write a note of appreciation for all her work for The Scarsdale Forum and community at large. I have enjoyed being her co-chair of the Education Committee. I will certainly miss her, and with time the Forum members and Board might miss her, too.

Best regards,

Carlos Ramírez