Profile of Ramahnik and LAUSD School Board Member Steve Zimmer!
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles recently did a fascinating profile of Ramahnik (Niv '86) Steve Zimmer, who sits on the Los Angeles School District Board of Education.
Here's an excerpt:
You might call Zimmer a modern-day Don Quixote, a man on a deeply personal but quite possibly futile quest to revitalize public education during one of the most fraught periods in American schools’ history — and in a landscape packed with counter forces so dizzying it makes La Mancha look like a playground. Is he mad? Maybe. And yet, there can be reason in madness. Zimmer is the kind of hero you want to see succeed — affable, passionate, intense and charismatic — and he approaches almost everything except politics with romantic brio.
Like any good literary character, Zimmer faces tough obstacles and has some tragic flaws. He took a huge pay cut to sit on the board full time, leaving his $90,000-per-year teacher’s salary for an annual income of about $50,000. “I don’t say this lightly, but financially, this has ruined me,” he says.