Citing increased work responsibilities, Westport Board of Education Chair Michael Gordon announced tonight he will resign by the end of June after serving six and a half years.
Chair Michael Gordon announces his resignation tonight as Superintendent of Schools Colleen Palmer listens. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Jarret Liotta for WestportNow.com
“I am at the point now with my day job that I can no longer continue my BOE service at the high intensity level that it requires,” he told tonight’s board meeting at its outset.
A public relations professional, Gordon was elected to the board in 2011 and became chair in 2014. He had served as special assistant on education policy for the Clinton Administration.
The Democrat said he was honored to have headed a board “in a highly engaged community with the schools serving as both the primary driver of move-ins and the heartbeat of activity in town.”
The board has been through “an enormously consequential period over the past few years,” Gordon said, listing numerous highlights, including hiring a new superintendent who is “one of the great superintendents of the country.”
He made clear he was proud of the collegial working style of the board. “And we have done our work while setting a standard of discourse in which we disagree in a way that we can hear one another and move the whole forward,” Gordon said.
He opened the meeting expressing condolences to the victims of the latest school shooting in Texas.
“The tragedy in Santa Fe is and has been and continues to be a tragedy for our whole country,” Gordon said. “At some point it will and has to stop.”
