“If there’s one word I use to describe myself, I would say ‘persistence,’” said Cedar Rapids School Board President Cindy Garlock. “That’s a close relative to ‘stubborn.’” Ms. Garlock’s resume might also bring to mind “resilience” and “adaptability.” The career educator and current Cedar Rapids School Board president had another path in mind growing up […]
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Click here to purchase a paywall bypass link“If there’s one word I use to describe myself, I would say ‘persistence,’” said Cedar Rapids School Board President Cindy Garlock. “That’s a close relative to ‘stubborn.’”
Ms. Garlock’s resume might also bring to mind “resilience” and “adaptability.” The career educator and current Cedar Rapids School Board president had another path in mind growing up in Van Horne.
“I had my eyes on a different program, and I didn’t get into the program,” Ms. Garlock, 71, recalled. “I regrouped and got my teaching certificate and that’s how I became a teacher.”
That happened at Wartburg College, where Ms. Garlock studied biology after graduating from Benton Community schools. She later earned a master’s in education from the College of St. Scholastica.
Her early experience in teaching both drew on and strengthened Ms. Garlock’s values.
“My first year was pretty tough” at what was then Wilson Junior High School, she said. “There were four of us in the science department, and three of us were new. We were literally helping each other get through the day and the year. It’s important to be persistent, because there were nights I went home and thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t for me.’”
Things improved by her third year, with a more experienced staff at Taft Junior High.
“Everyone was so supportive of everyone, and that helps me understand this really was something I could do,” Ms. Garlock said. “There were people helping me, supporting me.”
That kept Ms. Garlock in Cedar Rapids classrooms for 33 years, most of them teaching biology at Kennedy High School.
“When you are in a classroom with a group of really interested and energized students who have so much potential, it keeps you going back the next day and the next,” she said. “It’s a career that makes a difference in people’s lives, and that’s a very powerful feeling.”
Perhaps predictably for someone in the field, that goes beyond the classroom curriculum.
“I have personally benefited from her guidance during my time as her student and beyond,” sustainability consultant and climate scientist Tamara Marcus wrote in her nominating letter for Ms. Garlock’s Women of Influence nomination. “She took the time to connect me with influential career opportunities that have been invaluable to my development.”
“Teaching young people, you have so many opportunities to provide guidance and support,” Ms. Garlock said. “I look back at my teaching career, and I think I was most effective at being a cheerleader for students, supporting them.”
Leaving the classroom in 2010, Ms. Garlock traveled with her husband and worked with such community groups as the Shakespeare Garden Capital Campaign Committee, the Friends of Noelridge, and the Friends of Cedar Rapids Public Library. In 2016, officials with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign enlisted her as a local organizer.
“That opened a new chapter of my life,” she said. “I developed more leadership skills, learned to be comfortable in situations I maybe wouldn’t be comfortable in. I stated thinking there was some way for me to make a bigger contribution.”
That led to her successful campaign for School Board. She was elected to an at-large seat in 2019, just in time to manage a series of crises.
“We had COVID, we had the derecho, we had a cyberattack, we had an interim superintendent, we had a superintendent search” after the 2022 death of Supt. Noreen Bush due to cancer, Ms. Garlock said. “Any one of those things would be the big thing in anyone’s tenure.”
It wasn’t enough to prevent Ms. Garlock from seeking and winning a second four-year term, which runs through 2027. Call it persistence.
“We like to say that our decisions are data-informed, and the data shows us we have some room for improvement in a lot of different metrics,” she said. “It’s imperative that we put in place programs that help our kids better succeed after high school, whether that’s college, whether that’s the military, whether that’s the trades.”
“Cindy’s adaptability is unmatched,” Ashley Burns wrote in her nominating letter. “She has an uncanny ability to be exactly the person the world needs at exactly the right time.”
“You just never know where life is going to take you,” Ms. Garlock said. “It may not be what you expected, and be open to that.”
