When you see the construction going on around District 186, school board vice president Mike Zimmers – saying he stuck around long enough to see the fruits of those labors -wants you to remember the vote for an additional sales tax.
“We had not passed anything here since 1984,” Zimmers said after Monday’s board meeting. and i think our hope was that evening was that Springfield would come in at about 50-50 and the county would come carry us over in that vote. We were totally shocked; it was just the opposite. Springfield kicked butt, about 55 percent, and the county just barely passed it, so that did my heart good just to see the support we had in this particular community.”
Zimmers, whose 47 years in education include 37 in District 186 and time as a teacher and administrator, says the successful sales tax campaign – and the hiring of Jennifer Gill as superintendent – are the high points of his decade on the school board, which he says he is 99 percent sure will come to an end after the spring election. He’s inclined to continue his service in other ways and do some traveling.