I moved to Hudson in 2018.
My parents had moved north from Newburgh to Athens, and Hudson [directly across the river from Athens] had become a regular stop whenever we visited them. We’d spend time wandering around its shops and restaurants and gawking at its historic homes, and eventually started imagining what it might be like to live there.
After years in Brooklyn, it was becoming clear that my time in the city was coming to an end. Hudson seemed like a pretty good place to start the next chapter.
My son was young, so schools were a big part of the equation. And while Hudson’s schools left quite a bit to be desired on paper, my own experience growing up in Newburgh gave me a different perspective on what makes a good public education.
Hudson had a diverse student population, received significant state aid, and spent a relatively large amount per pupil. That translated into programs, services, and opportunities you might not expect to find in a district its size. I did a lot of research, convinced myself it was an encouraging story, and decided we could make it work. We found a house, made the move, and jumped right in.
I’d love to say the transition was seamless, but getting to know a new community and figuring out how to make sure my son received the education and support he needed was considerably more complicated than I expected.
Because Hudson is a complicated place. There’s tremendous wealth alongside significant poverty, and a community that’s been dealing with the effects of gentrification and displacement for years. The schools sit somewhere in the middle of all of it, serving families whose experiences, expectations, and resources can be radically different.
While I understood some of that intellectually before moving, living in it was something else entirely. We stumbled through it all, becoming more perplexed by the mysteries of our public school system. My son was in first grade, so I figured there was plenty of time to sort things out. Unfortunately, it would only get harder.
The summer after our first school year in Hudson, a student in my son’s class was killed in a car accident. It was heartbreaking, and particularly difficult for a young child to process. I expected it to be one of those moments when the school community would come together, both to grieve and to support one another. But when I attended the funeral, I recognized only a handful of people from school.
It was summer, and I understood that people had their own circumstances. I certainly wasn’t in a position to judge anyone for not being there. But the experience stayed with me. I had expected to feel part of an extended family, and instead I was struck by how disconnected we all seemed.
The following year, things started getting better. We developed relationships with other families and district employees, figured out how to navigate the system, and became more confident that our son was getting what he needed. We were finally starting to feel like we belonged.
Then COVID happened.
Schools everywhere were dealing with an extraordinary situation, and I don’t envy anyone who had to make decisions during that period. But from the perspective of a parent, it felt like decisions were being made somewhere far away, with very little opportunity for families to participate in the conversation.
There were public meetings and opportunities for input, but they frequently felt performative. People were frustrated, information was difficult to come by, and nobody seemed to feel particularly empowered to do anything about it.
I knew the district had a superintendent and a board of education, but I didn’t really understand how those relationships worked. I’d assumed we’d eventually become involved in something like the PTO, except there didn’t seem to be an obvious or accessible parent organization to join. The more questions I asked, the more complicated the answers became.
In May 2021, while we were all still trying to regain some sense of normalcy, the district held its annual school board election and budget vote. There were three open seats on the board, and only one candidate on the ballot. That didn’t sit right with me.
Here was a community where people had plenty of opinions about the schools, but apparently very few were interested in participating in the institution responsible for governing them. It felt like another symptom of the disconnect I’d been experiencing since we moved. After talking it over with my family and a few people I trusted, I decided to run a write-in campaign.
I’d spent most of my adult life running a small business, managing clients, collaborating with creative teams, and occasionally convincing people to do things they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to do. I figured at least some of those skills would translate to serving on a school board. I was both right and wrong.
I won the election, and because I was filling a vacant seat, I was sworn in that very night, which gave me considerably less time to figure out what I’d gotten myself into than I might have preferred. My first board meeting was particularly memorable. The superintendent, who had led the district for roughly ten years, announced that she was retiring.
Before long, I was helping lead the search for a new superintendent, coordinating the committee responsible for the process. The following year, I was elected vice president of the board. I was getting a pretty good look at how the district operated, and every time I thought I was finding my footing, another challenge came along.
When we eventually hired a new superintendent, the board was excited about the possibility of changing how things worked. Unfortunately, not everyone was as enthusiastic about change as we were. I was discovering that having good ideas and getting people to embrace them required two very different sets of skills.
The first thing I had to get used to was how slowly everything moved. Even when everyone agreed that something needed to change, figuring out how to make it happen could take months or years. I found this incredibly frustrating. At Ghost Robot, if something isn’t working, we can usually get the right people in a room, figure out what needs to change, and start doing something about it. There are only so many people involved, and most of the time we have the authority to make the decisions ourselves.
A public school district operates in an entirely different universe. Contrary to popular belief, school boards don’t actually run the schools. We hire and evaluate the superintendent, establish policy, oversee the budget, and make sure the district is working toward its goals. The day-to-day decisions belong to the people we’ve entrusted to do those jobs. On top of this, there are laws, contracts, state regulations, and a long list of stakeholders with legitimate interests in almost every decision.
I had to learn how to influence outcomes without personally controlling the work. That meant asking better questions, establishing clearer expectations, and understanding the difference between holding someone accountable and telling them how to do their job. I can have plenty of ideas about moving an administrator here, changing a program there, or making a school event more meaningful. And sure, my opinion matters, and people might listen. But an organization with hundreds of employees and nearly 1,500 students can’t rely on my judgment for every decision that needs to be made. Nor should it.
For most of our company’s history, Zach and I have been involved in nearly every significant decision. That’s one of the advantages of running an independent creative company. We can move quickly, take risks, and change direction without asking permission from a room full of people. It’s also one of the limitations. When a company depends on a small group of people to make every decision, their judgment becomes both its greatest strength and its biggest constraint.
I’ve spent years thinking about how to make Ghost Robot more creatively ambitious. Serving on the school board pushed me to think more seriously about how to make it a better organization. We’ve always believed in process and have developed plenty of policies and systems over the years. But unlike a school district, where the board sets expectations and evaluates the superintendent’s performance, Zach and I are responsible for setting our own goals and deciding whether we’re meeting them. It’s hard to hold yourself accountable when you’re also the person making the rules. Sometimes I wish we had a board of our own.
Accountability only works when everyone agrees on what they’re trying to accomplish in the first place. That’s given me a different appreciation for mission and vision, two things I’d previously thought about mostly in the context of branding. In a school district, mission and vision aren’t just exercises in positioning. They’re supposed to provide continuity when the people, priorities, and circumstances inevitably change. When decisions take months or years, you need something more durable than whoever happens to be in the room that evening. You need a shared understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish and a way to evaluate whether you’re actually getting there.
At Ghost Robot, we’ve spent years helping clients articulate what they believe, what makes them different, and how they want to present themselves to the world. Meanwhile, for much of our own history, our “mission” was to make cool things and work with good people. That’s not a terrible ambition, but also not particularly useful when you’re trying to figure out where a company should go next.
Even with everything I was learning on the school board, it took me a good two years to work through a rebrand and repositioning of Ghost Robot. We needed to get clearer about who we are, what we do, and what we’re trying to build. I think we’ve made progress, although I’m pretty sure we’re not finished. Turns out it’s a lot easier to help someone else figure out what their company stands for than to do it for your own.
Despite how much time and energy I’ve committed to my role as a board member, most school board meetings are pretty boring. We spend a lot of time reviewing policies, approving expenditures, and discussing things that would probably put most people to sleep. But every once in a while, someone shows up who’s really angry about something, and suddenly the meeting gets a lot more interesting.
I’ve had people yell at us during public comment, approach me in the grocery store to complain about something happening at school, and write some pretty unflattering things about me on Facebook and local blogs. It’s a strange experience to have people publicly criticize decisions you’ve spent hours trying to get right, particularly when you can’t always explain everything that went into making them.
I’ve had to get comfortable with the fact that people aren’t necessarily going to like me or agree with the decisions we make. And sometimes they’re right to be upset. The challenge is figuring out what you can learn from that frustration without letting the loudest voices dominate the conversation. I’ve had to get much better at listening, and not just waiting for someone to finish talking so I can explain why they’re wrong.
Serving on a school board has put me in rooms with people I probably never would have met otherwise. Parents frustrated about things I’d never considered. Teachers trying to do their jobs within constraints most families never see. Community members who have lived in Hudson their entire lives and watched the schools change through several generations. It’s forced me to understand issues that don’t have anything to do with my own family’s experience.
That doesn’t mean I’ve become some sort of expert on everyone else’s life, far from it. But it’s made me more curious, more willing to question my assumptions, and more aware of how much I don’t know. Sometimes people understand an issue better than I do. Other times, they’re working with incomplete information or making assumptions I know aren’t accurate. Either way, dismissing their concerns doesn’t accomplish much.
Advertising is fundamentally about understanding people, but it’s remarkably easy to do that work surrounded by people who share similar backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. Creativity requires a willingness to step outside your own experience and consider the world from someone else’s perspective. Having to do that regularly, with real people whose lives are different from mine, has made me a better creative person.
It’s also changed how I approach disagreements at Ghost Robot. Consensus isn’t about getting everyone to agree with you. It’s about understanding competing interests, finding common ground, and making sure people feel their perspective has been considered, even when the final decision isn’t the one they wanted. That’s a much more useful skill than winning an argument, and one I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to bring back to work.
One of the hardest things to accept has been that understanding a problem doesn’t necessarily mean you can solve it. We can spend months working through an issue, make what we believe is a thoughtful, informed decision, and still not get the outcome we wanted. Academic performance is probably the most frustrating example. Despite years of effort, our test scores have remained largely flat, and in some areas they’ve declined. We continue to struggle to improve outcomes for our English language learners and close the achievement gaps between students of color and their peers. We’ve spent countless hours discussing these challenges, reviewing data, setting goals, and trying to find ways forward. But I’ve had to accept that doing the work doesn’t guarantee the result, which is particularly difficult when the consequences affect children.
And while we’re still trying to solve these longstanding problems, an entirely new set of challenges is emerging. Smartphones, social media, and now AI are changing how kids learn, communicate, form relationships, and understand the world around them. We’re trying to improve academic performance while also dealing with the social and emotional consequences of growing up in a world that looks very different from the one we grew up in. Schools are being asked to respond to all of it, often without the resources, expertise, or time to fully understand what’s happening.
There’s a strange parallel to what’s happening in the creative industry. We’re also trying to understand how these technologies are changing the way people think, behave, and communicate, while simultaneously figuring out what they mean for our own work. We’re in the middle of a fundamental shift, but there’s no opportunity to stop, sort through the implications, and recalibrate our businesses. We have to keep selling, building, and making decisions about the future while the ground is still shifting beneath us.
Neither a school district nor a creative company gets to stop operating while it figures out what comes next. And in both cases, the temptation is to focus on the technology itself, because that’s the part we can see changing. But the harder questions are about people. What do we want them to learn? What do we want them to value? What kinds of relationships and experiences are we helping them build? Those questions are a lot harder to answer than whether we should allow ChatGPT in a classroom or use it to make our next commercial.
Through all of it, there’s the nagging question of whether we’re making the right decisions. It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate problems, the budgets, the policies, the new technologies, and the pressure to keep moving. But those things are only useful if they’re helping us accomplish something that matters. At Ghost Robot, that means building a company that can continue to do meaningful creative work in a changing industry. On the school board, it means making sure the decisions we’re making are actually improving the lives of students. Including my own son.
That’s probably been the hardest part. I’m expected to consider what’s best for an entire district, while also being a parent who wants the best possible education for his kid. Those two responsibilities don’t always point in the same direction, and separating them is considerably harder than I expected.
My parents spent their careers teaching in public schools, and I grew up believing that education could open doors and change the direction of someone’s life. I still believe that, which is why I find the setbacks so frustrating and the work so difficult to walk away from. I wish I could tell you this story ends with a list of accomplishments wrapped in a nice little bow. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s worked out. We’re now on our fifth superintendent since I joined the board [this is a whole conversation on its own], and countless families are still struggling with the same questions my family faced when we moved here.
But there have been some encouraging changes, even if they’re not the ones I originally imagined. When I ran for the board, part of my frustration was that there seemed to be so few ways for families to get involved. Today, we have a revived booster club and a flourishing PTO. I’d like to think that by sticking around, not giving up, and trying to make the district a little more accessible, I’ve helped create some room for people to get involved in other ways. Resilience has always been one of my stronger qualities.
I went into this thinking I had something useful to offer the school district. I hope I have. I’d encourage everyone to find some way to get involved in their community. It doesn’t have to mean running for office or joining a board. There are plenty of ways to contribute, and we could use more people willing to show up, ask questions, and participate.
If you’re curious about public education, serving on a school board, or any of my experiences over the past five years, I’m always happy to talk about it. Hit me up.
