Cathy Allen, 56, of Hollywood, is a candidate for a fourth term as District 2 representative on the St. Mary’s County Board of Education. She is challenged by Jim Davis in the November 6 election. The following is a recent interview with Bay Net Editor Dick Myers. It was edited slightly for space considerations.
The Bay Net (TBN): Tell us about yourself.
Allen: I was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Northern Virginia. I went to school at the University of Virginia. I was one of the first classes of women to go there and because it was a state school it was single sex, it was all men up until just a few years before I started. I stayed there and worked as a critical care nurse in the surgical intensive care unit after I graduated. I eventually moved to the Tidewater area of Virginia which is where I met my husband who was in the Navy at the time. When he got out of the active duty side of the Navy he got a job with NAVAIR and we moved here in 1996, which was just ahead of NAVAIR moving down here in 1997. We did that because our children were young; my son was in second grade and our daughter was in pre-school and we didn’t want to uproot them twice in a year’s period of time. So we moved here and he did the long commute to Crystal City for that year so that the children could become established here in school and start to make some friends.
TBN: Werew you active in the schools when they started?
Allen: I was very active in the schools, both in my daughter’s pre-school and my son’s elementary school. I was fortunate enough to be able to do that. In volunteering in the classrooms, that gave me the opportunity to become involved with the PTA and I started doing things with the PTA, like I was writing grants for the school to bring various art groups in and performance groups. We had a pretty robust program for the years that I was there because of my willingness to write grants for them to help them bring in science people and performing arts and music and such. I also put together a science and technology fair. They had done a math night and an English night but they had never done a science night. I brought in a wide variety of varied professions within the field of science and engineering and math so that the children could see what options were out there. It was kind of a hands on kind of thing and it gave kids the opportunity to see what was out there and that there were both men and women in the field of science and that there were things that were fun and interesting, everybody from the Calvert Marine Museum to SMECO to somebody from St. Mary’s College.
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