Newcomer Hassemer Running for School Board

It may take a village to raise a child, but believes that it takes a couple of schools to shape a community. That’s why the 47-year-old mother of two and corporate vice president is running for the Brentwood Board of Education. She wants to be part of the process.

Hassemer is seeking one of the three . A relative newcomer to Brentwood, she and her family relocated from New Jersey in 2009 for work.
 
Schools dictated where they would live in the St. Louis metro area, and the family investigated five school districts—“the usual suspects, like Clayton,” she said—before deciding upon Brentwood.

“We liked the sense of community,” she said. Her children liked the Brentwood schools.
 
Hassemer didn’t have an epiphany about running for school board after she met the 12-month residency requirement. She just kept thinking about it, usually while sitting in the stands watching her son play football. A notice about the upcoming school board election in the newspaper finally set this mom in motion. “Why not?” she thought.
 
“I care very deeply about my children and other children,” Hassemer said. “It’s kind of like motherhood and world peace, but it’s true. I am confident in what I can contribute. I’m not saying that I could do better than the other candidates. It’s knowing that I could do a good job.”
 
Hassemer is obviously comfortable in her own skin. “I like who I am,” she said while padding about her house in bare feet on a chilly Brentwood morning. She is also comfortable where she is in her life. Hassemer is vice president of the global operations center for Savvis.

“It’s basically the ‘help desk’ for the computer systems that we support globally,” Hassemer said. She has 400 employees reporting to her.
 
Her life is busy, but by her own accounts, manageable. She tries to arrive at work by 7 a.m. and stays until at least 5 or 6 p.m., unless there is a school event to watch. It helps to have a spouse who works from home. Hassemer has been known to occasionally slip away from work to watch her kids’ events. Her boss approves; he serves on his school board too.
 
Her passion for Brentwood aside, Hassemer points to her executive experience as a reason for voting for her this coming April.

“I had never been on a school board, but I had been on the boards of business and management,” she said. “I have done technology. I have done construction. I have done policy work. All of these can help balance the experience of the other board members.”
 
Many of her answers to specific school questions were framed in a business-world perspective. Take the budget, for example. Revenue funds available to the school district are down. How and what would she decide to trim if necessary?

“I haven’t seen the budget yet, so I can’t say what I would cut,” Hassemer said. “To be honest, I would look at administrative costs before I looked at the student context. I would watch out for things that would minimize our mission, which is teaching children. I would look at the largest third-party contracts and make sure they are competitively negotiated or renegotiated, and I would make sure I have relevant benchmark data. That’s one of the tactics I use in my own work.”

Hassemer also addressed the state of Brentwood school buildings, one of which dates back to the 1920s.

“Maintaining and upgrading is typically less expensive than rebuilding,” Hassemer said. “But we need to be judicious that upgrades enhance children’s learning."

And what about combining the grade schools? “I would want to know first how this would impact the students,” Hassemer said. “Would it result in larger classes? If this needs to be considered, it needs to a have thoughtful analyses.”
 
While Hassemer wants Brentwood residents to know about her background in business and passion for the community, what she really wants them to know is that she is the mom of David () and Sophia Rivera ().

—

Michelle A. Hassemer
9425 Pine Avenue
 
PERSONAL: Age 47. Married to Edwin Rivera. They have two children: David Rivera Hassemer, 15, and Sophia Rivera Hassemer, 12.
 
OCCUPATION: Vice president, global operations center, Savvis.
 
EDUCATION: Hassemer received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in business administration 1992 from Marquette University. She has also attended executive courses in strategy and finance at the Harvard Business School.
 
RELEVANT  BACKGROUND: In the past, Hassemer served on several boards within the corporations where she has worked. The boards include information technology, policy, budgeting, finance, construction and energy conservation.

Editor's note: This is the second article in a series of candidate profiles leading up to the April 5 election.