A Conversation with Donna Howard

(This piece was written for the newsletter of the All Austin Cooperative Nursery School, founded in 1953 as the city’s first integrated preschool. Donna Howard is a lifetime trustee and board president whose children all attended the co-op.)

By Kris Asthalter

Labs have big root beer brown eyes and it’s hard to tell them their morning walk through the park will have to be postponed. So, even though I don’t have time to shower before meeting a friend at 9:30 a.m., I walk the dog. Shortly after arriving at Texas French Bread on South Congress I spot another sweaty jock in running shorts and a baseball cap coming through the door. It’s Donna Howard. She takes one look at me and laughs. She now thinks she doesn’t have to apologize for showing up ‘fresh’ from Town Lake, but I explain that I have changed my shirt, anyway. We fall in to that wonderful, familiar banter that somehow always takes up wherever it left off with Co-op friends. Donna was board president when I was fundraising chair, and our kids were in Cass’s four year old class together. This year they’ll graduate from college. How is that possible? (It will happen to you)

Donna orders an oatmeal muffin and skim milk – obviously still adhering to the healthy snack philosophy – and we head to a table in the back. Donna’s lugging a notebook chocked full of campaign related papers, including a map of District 48 which clearly resembles a dragon with hefty back quarters. The dragon’s tail is out there in Lago Vista, Jonestown and Volente and its relatively teeny head is a small neighborhood bounded by Jollyville Road, Mopac and Lamar. It also includes Northwest Hills, Brykerwoods, Tarrytown, Jester Estates, the City Park area, and part of West Lake Hills. Donna apologizes for not having any push cards. I ask for a definition. Push cards are those little campaign flyers with the candidate’s photo and a short blurb that you ‘push’ on people during the race. This race has just begun, and push cards will come later.

Donna asks me how things are going for me and I catch her up on a few things before I start asking questions. My first is “Why are you running?” She wasn’t planning on it. (Come to think of it, I wasn’t planning on being fundraising chair, either.) Kelly White and Ann Kitchen approached her this summer, encouraging her to take it on because Donna has the ‘life experiences’ to make her a viable candidate. As Donna sums it up, with a laugh, “I’m older.” She wrestled with the idea for a couple of months and around Labor Day decided to run. Knowing that Donna has run for office before and served on the Eanes School Board, I ask if she has been through some of these same hoops before and if that was making it easier this time? She answers quickly, “yes and no.” “Yes,” she’s been through some of this before, but “no,” it’s still not any easier. This campaign is so much more involved, so much wider in scope – involving more issues and processes that are sometimes grueling, such as relying too often on e-mails for communication when discussing things as a group around a big table would avoid so many misunderstandings. The efficiency of professional political consultants has its price. (I can’t help thinking of our own AACNS board meetings, which go for hours and sometimes make us almost slap happy, but we do really get to know and care about each other.)

I ask my next question: “What are the big issues for you?” Donna’s response is clearly the reason Kelly White and Ann Kitchen encouraged her to run for this seat. There is no ambivalence: Number one: school finance. Close behind: restoring health care (CHIP). Next: take the pressure of high insurance rates and high property taxes off homeowners and return tuition rates to a level affordable for middle class families. Texas needs a fair and broad based tax system that fits our economy and demographic. And lastly, but woven into all of these, to find solutions to all of these issues in a cooperative, community-based, non-partisan, ‘just say no to gridlock’ manner. Donna reveals her Co-op background, emphasizing working for the good of the group, finding the best possible solutions by the whole community, for the whole community.

I ask what’s been most gratifying about the process [of running for office] and Donna’s answer comes easily: Talking to people who are really interested, who want to solve problems, and who have not just given up. Donna is energized by the people out there who really care and are willing to work.

The flip side of this question is, of course, what is most disturbing about the process [of running for office]. Again, the answer comes quickly. Donna knows that there will be negative attacks on her record and her character and that she will have to spend time preparing for these attacks. Keeping her eye on the big picture is crucial on this point. I’m impressed with how level-headed she is about the issue of negative campaign tactics.

When I ask what or who has been her most valuable resource, Donna credits Kelly White and Ann Kitchen, first and foremost, as encouragers and supporters, and adds the educational community, non-profits, TEA, League of Women Voters studies, the web (for reading newspapers in other areas of the district) and people unhappy with the school finance gridlock. Donna has offered her first arguable response. It seems pretty obvious to me that she is in fact her own most valuable resource.

So I ask, “How do you stay sane?” My original question, the one I had scribbled down on a piece of paper, was “When and how do you recreate?” By the time we get to this I just blurt out, “How do you stay sane??!” It seems so much more appropriate. Donna’s answer is “I run.” Not for office, this time, but on Town Lake. And she tries to keep the big picture in view at all times; not letting minutia take over; tries to stay integrated, as a person. “This effort is not about me – it is a huge team effort and I am representing a huge group of people. You have to keep your ego in check.”

Finally, I can’t resist a little looking back and ask, “How did spraying bleach on Formica tables at the Co-op prepare you for this campaign?” Donna knows this is really not a joke. Being a Co-op parent really did serve as training for being an activist, an advocate. Donna recalls many years ago when her kids were at the Co-op, having the confidence – for the first time – to speak out in public (this was in a restaurant) in defense of her children and her position as their mother. It was basically a matter of her telling someone who was telling her kids what to do that they needed to come to her if they had something to say. It was a little deal, looking back, but a big deal for her at the time. Her first public speaking engagement. Not the last.