I lifted this photo from Mrs. Rogers’ Facebook page. I hope that’s legal. It shows Rob as the interviewee for a change.
The BBC is asking the question. So is CNN, Russia Today and Al Jazeera.
Who is Rob Rogers, the newest appointee to the Billings School District 2 Board of Trustees? Well, as the Billings Gazette explained, Rob is a former Gazette reporter who covered the district for the past five years.
But people want to know more about him, and since I sat about four feet away from him during 90 percent of his career at the Gazette, I thought I should help.
I heard maybe a month ago, after he had announced that he was leaving the Gazette at the end of the school year, that Rob was thinking of applying for the trustee position vacated by Lindsey Graves, who moved to South Dakota.
My first thought was that I should call some of my former Gazette colleagues and organize an intervention. Why would anyone in his right mind — anyone who had covered the School Board — want to serve on that body?
I covered the Billings City Council on and off for more than 10 years, and I couldn’t have been induced to run for a seat on the council if someone had stuck a gun to my head. Besides sitting four feet apart, Rob and I also worked Monday nights together, since the council and School Board both met on those nights.
It always seemed to happen that if things were boring on the city side, they were jumping over at District 2, and vice versa. That meant one or the other of us had a short meeting … while the other was enduring Chinese water torture in the form of endless public hearings or interminable debates.
One of the great consoling things about working for Last Best News is that on those rare occasions when I do cover the City Council, I am free to leave when I want to. Not so for the City Hall or District 2 reporter, who can only leave under deadline pressure, which means sitting through five or six hours of the meeting at least.
There are times, of course, when I choose to sit on my arse all night, as I did when the City Council took public comment on the proposed nondiscrimination ordinance until nearly 6 a.m. But I wanted to be part of history, no matter how excruciating.
That’s the point: I chose to do it. When Rob and I covered our meetings on the same nights we had no choice, and often the only encouragement we received in the midst of our misery were Tweets between the two of us.
But that’s what else I learned about Rob in all those years of close proximity: He really is an upstanding fellow, and despite the many manifest disadvantages of serving on the School Board, Rob seems to have concluded that the work that needed doing was worth doing.
It was a mark of his even-handed coverage that trustees thought he deserved the job. He covered the district well and thoroughly, and with never a hint of bias or rancor or sarcasm, an ingredient I sometimes introduced into my own coverage as a way of preserving my sanity.
I think you can believe what Rob said about why he decided to seek the position — that he has three daughters in the district and wants to help make it as good as it can be. I’ve met his daughters. They’re worth the trouble, believe me.
And when he spoke of being able to work with others, you can believe that, too. In a newsroom where personalities often clashed and chafed, Rob was well liked and always willing to do what he could to make things flow smoothly. At this point you may be sensing his chief fault, if he has one.
I hope he doesn’t try too hard to get along. He’s got some good fellow trustees at the moment and a pleasant, hard-working superintendent in Terry Bouck. But we’ve had some real jackasses on the board and in the superintendent’s office. We’ll have them again, and at that point I hope Rob worries more about doing the right thing than getting along with everyone.
Likewise, I hope — and I have no reason to believe otherwise — that Rob will stand up for complete openness and transparency. The School Board, like the City Council, seems to go through fits of ignoring state law in regard to open meetings and open records. When that happens again, Rob, and it will, give ’em hell.
If I could say one more thing about Rob, it is that he will be, I say with some confidence, the biggest Wilco fan ever to serve as a District 2 trustee.
