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PrintStephanie Hightower in your face
This story appeared in the April 2004 issue of Columbus Monthly.
Stephanie Hightower sits at a conference table in the Columbus Board of Education’s drab basement meeting room. As usual, she stands out. With her shoulder-length braids, flashy jewelry and prominent cheekbones, she’s a striking woman in designer duds in a place more accustomed to bland middle-aged folks in conservative suits. Yet Hightower appears comfortable and confident; as a former Olympic hurdler, she’s used to the spotlight. As always, she’s the best-dressed person in the room.
This is Hightower’s show. Earlier, her colleagues appointed her to a fourth term as board president. She whips through agenda items, jokes with her fellow board members and isn’t afraid to glare at reporters and suggest story ideas. “I hope the Dispatch reporter is here to get all the names for the front page of the paper tomorrow,” Hightower says, after the board presents awards to nine fourth-graders for earning perfect scores on recent proficiency tests. Presumably she’s kidding, but she doesn’t crack a smile.
The circus environment doesn’t frighten her, either. A man dressed head to toe in prison black and white stripes passes out fliers accusing Hightower of calling a “14-year-old student a nigger in front of her white husband.” Hightower signs a stack of certificates while the same man berates her and her colleagues during the board’s public comment section. She never looks at him.
She ends the public comment section, and the board prepares to go into executive session to discuss labor negotiations. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” shouts a regular public speaker. Earlier, Hightower called the woman’s name, but she wasn’t in the room at the time. Now, the woman wants Hightower to bend the rules for her. Fat chance. Hightower ignores the catcalls, gathers her papers and moves on.
A few days later, Hightower is in her office at the Columbus College of Art & Design, where she serves as vice president for external relations. A visitor notices a clear plastic bag that contains a box with the word “bitch” written on it. She unleashes a full, loud laugh. You wonder if she’s going to pull a muscle. “Do you want to look at it?” she asks, referring to the bag.
Hightower stretches her 5-foot-4-inch frame to reach the top of the bookshelf and spreads the contents of the bag on a table. There’s bitch detergent, bitch soap, bitch body wash (“sharpens cat fight skills”). “It really has some fun stuff in there,” Hightower says. The gag gift is from Angela Pace, the Channel 10 anchor and Hightower’s friend. “I’m a feisty person, and most of my friends know that,” Hightower says.
Indeed, Hightower is no shrinking violet, no political robot. She’s independent, outspoken, tough, no-nonsense—qualities that have made her both an emerging political star and one of the city’s most controversial public figures. “Whatever it takes, she’s going to do it,” Columbus Mayor Mike Coleman says.
Hightower and her husband, David Baker, development director in the administration of former Gov. Dick Celeste, are part of a circle of movers and shakers that includes Coleman and his wife, Frankie; powerful attorney Larry James and his wife, Donna, a Nationwide executive, and Janet Jackson, the head of the United Way of Central Ohio and a former Columbus city attorney. Hightower’s ties stretch across party lines: Democrat Coleman’s predecessor, Republican Greg Lashutka, also supports her. Before running for political office, she worked for Lashutka as a press secretary and a special assistant. (She’s a registered independent, though the Democratic Party has twice endorsed her.) “What you see is a person who is not going to venture too far to the left or too far to the right,” says Larry James, a Republican who also has a reputation for bipartisanship and served as Hightower’s campaign treasurer during her first school board race. “Her loyalty lies to the district and getting things done.”
Hightower’s supporters say the ex-jock is a disciplined “natural leader” who refuses to make excuses, demands high standards and asks tough questions. During Hightower’s first year as president, the board hired Gene Harris as superintendent. Since then, Harris largely has won over parents and teachers, stabilized the leadership at the top of the district and promised to finish her career in Columbus. “Stephanie has a willingness to look at things not as they are but as they could be,” Harris says. “She has a willingness to push the envelope. And she pushes the envelope with me.”
During her four years as president, Hightower can point to an impressive list of accomplishments. The district passed a nearly $400 million bond issue despite gloomy predictions, approved a contract with the teachers’ union during a difficult economic time and became one of the first urban school districts in the state to escape “academic emergency.” Plus, in last November’s election to fill four school board seats, Hightower led the successful bipartisan “Four for Reform” campaign—which ended Bill Moss’s 25-year tenure on the board. Moss was a heroic whistle-blower to his supporters, but others considered him an embarrassment and a political liability.
“The effectiveness of Columbus schools has definitely improved the last couple of years, and Stephanie Hightower deserves credit for that progress,” says Mark Real, president of KidsOhio.org, a nonpartisan child’s advocacy organization that monitors education issues in Ohio.
Yet she’s also shown a clumsy side. She’s found herself in the middle of a series of controversies, from a foulmouthed lecture she gave a student who threw a rock at her car to her cozy relationship with former Columbus City Council president Jerry Hammond, who recently was awarded a six-figure PR contract by the school board. “I have received a lot of calls and a number of letters from people requesting that we not put her back as president,” says longtime school board member Loretta Heard.
Even Hightower’s friends call her “rough around the edges,” “loudmouthed” and “good old-fashioned stubborn” and compare her to shoot-from-the-hip politicians such as former Columbus Mayor Buck Rinehart.
Candy Young-Sanders is a friend of Hightower from her track and field days. Now an assistant track coach at the University of Pittsburgh, Young-Sanders helped Hightower get elected chairwoman of USA Track & Field four years ago. “She’s always been pretty aggressive,” Young-Sanders says. “She’s always pretty much known what she’s wanted.”
From her sophomore year at Ohio State to her last year on the international track circuit a decade later, Hightower was one of the fastest women in the world, setting an American record in the 100-meter hurdles. She made the 1980 Olympic team, but the U.S. boycott of the games held in the Soviet Union prevented her from competing. Four years later, she was the favorite to win the gold in the 100-meter hurdles, but narrowly missed making the American squad in a controversial photo finish, one of the closest races in the history of the Olympic trials.
Hightower was small for a hurdler—most are 5-foot-8 and above—but she overcame that drawback with relentless training, perfect technique and a fearsome presence. During races, she ignored her competitors and refused to talk to anyone except her coach, Mamie Rallins. Hightower would intentionally set her blocks in the wrong lane—a good trick to pull on a younger hurdler—and she’d run a full flight of hurdles in warm-ups to wow her competitors with her superior training. “She was the queen of intimidation and mind games,” Young-Sanders says.
With a laugh, Dave Dobos, a former school board president and a Hightower supporter, says, “Stephanie will do what she wants to do,” and acknowledges that some of her best attributes—her brash style, in particular—also are her faults. “Does anybody like everything about every elected official, any elected official?” Dobos asks. “You can’t please all the people all the time, and the one thing that is really good for Stephanie is that she has the confidence in herself that if folks don’t like her, they can pound salt.”
Hammond says, “No one owns Stephanie.” And James says that in Hightower, Columbus is watching the emergence of a new leader with a unique style. “And I think it’s the sort of style and swagger that we need to get something done,” he says.
Perhaps nothing better captures Hightower’s “style and swagger” than the events of Oct. 29. On that Wednesday evening, six days before voters would elect her to a second term on the board, Hightower and her 12-year-old son, Cameron, were passengers in an SUV that her husband, Baker, was driving. The trio was heading home through their near-east-side neighborhood when Hightower noticed a teenager standing at the side of the road. “I watch him as he pulls his hand back and throws this huge rock into the side of the car, the passenger side,” she recalls.
The impact made an explosive noise and Baker slammed on the brakes. “It was so shocking,” Hightower says. “We all make sure everybody is OK. Then I’m looking right at this kid. He starts running and for whatever reason, my initial reaction was go and get this kid. Find out why he did this.”
With her adrenaline pumping, and despite high heels, the 45-year-old former track star chased after the teen—until he hopped a fence. “I said, ‘Now you’re being stupid,’ ” she recalls. “ ‘You’re not jumping over no fence with a dress and heels.’ ”
But she didn’t give up. She had her husband drive around the neighborhood in search of the boy. She found him at the nearby Eldon W. Ward YMCA and confronted him there. Hightower says she wanted to hold the teen accountable—and made sure he knew she was the president of his school board. “We got too many kids dying in the street. We got random acts of violence going on all the time. I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of senior citizens.”
In an interview on “Front Street,” a public affairs program on WVKO 1580-AM, the boy claimed Hightower grabbed him around the neck and called him a “nigger.” Hightower denies touching the teen and using the slur, though she admits to using profanity and wagging a finger in his face. “Anyone who knows me knows I swear,” she says. “I cuss. They know I have a dirty mouth from time to time, depending on the situation. That comes from my military background. That comes from sports.” (Hightower’s father was a tank officer in the U.S. Army.)
The boy’s grandmother didn’t appreciate Hightower’s efforts. Speaking on “Front Street,” the grandmother, who is raising the boy, said her 14-year-old grandson shouldn’t have thrown the rock—and she punished him accordingly—but Hightower had no right to confront the boy.
Heard, the school board member, agrees. She says Hightower’s reaction was emotional, unprofessional and particularly inappropriate for a school board president. “After she saw where he went, she should have reported it, got his parents’ name and then let them know what had taken place,” she says.
About a month later, when two dozen people showed up at a board meeting to complain about her actions, Hightower apologized for the incident. “I need to clean up my mouth a little bit,” she says now. “I need to do a better job there.”
Still, her actions gained her fans. She received three sets of flowers at her office at CCAD, as well as “numerous” supportive e-mails and telephone calls.
Baker says the episode reveals more than just his wife’s tough side. “Beginning that evening, she started to create an intervention for this kid with other strong male personalities to help join into his life and help guide him,” Baker says. “You might think of her as a strong-fisted, loudmouthed person. She can be that. But there’s a big heart that goes with it.”
Baker and Hightower are one of the city’s more interesting power couples—two very different, very successful people. Consider how each handled the rock incident. Hightower was emotional, angry and combative. Baker was calm, careful and quiet. He didn’t say a word during Hightower’s confrontation with the boy.
They met through mutual friend Mike Coleman, who arranged their first date in the mid ’90s. Hightower, who was working for Lashutka then, recently had divorced her first husband. Baker was a widower. At first, Hightower was skeptical. Baker is 14 years older than she is. And, “I had never interracially dated,” she says.
Hightower arranged to meet Baker in a far-off restaurant so no one would see her with him “just in case he was a dork.” But they hit it off. “He was just a very nice man,” she says. “It was nice to meet someone who was mature.” In 1996, they married after Baker proposed during a champagne dinner aboard a 14-foot traditional Egyptian sailboat on the Nile River.
(The couple doesn’t merely travel; they adventure travel, spending a couple of weeks in an Amazon River village in Ecuador seven years ago and a month camping in the bush of southern Ethiopia two years later. Hightower made the trip to Ethiopia even though she was recovering at the time from sarcoidosis, a fairly serious immune system disease.)
Baker says beneath the surface, he and his wife have much in common; they both are passionate and unpredictable and will take risks others might not. Indeed, Baker seems more like an ex-hippie than a former government official. A graduate of progressive Antioch College in Yellow Springs, he wears his gray hair in a ponytail and decorates his office with art from around the globe.
After leaving the Celeste administration, Baker became an international economic development consultant in eastern Europe, Africa and southeast Asia. Soon after he and Hightower married, he took a job as the head of Columbus Urban Growth Corp., the city’s nonprofit development arm, and the couple and their son, Cameron, settled into the former home of painter Emerson Burkhart, north of Franklin Park. (Cameron is Hightower’s only child from her first marriage; Baker has adopted him.)
Dobos says Hightower can rely on a network of well-connected friends and insiders to provide guidance during rough times. “The thing that’s helped her a great deal is that her husband is very politically astute,” Dobos says. “And one of her best friends is Frankie Coleman. If you have Frankie’s ear, you’ll have the mayor’s ear as well.”
Those connections also have turned her into a powerhouse political fundraiser. Her ties to Democrats and Republicans give her credibility with the Titans, labor unions and neighborhood activists. With James as her first campaign treasurer, Hightower raised $120,000, far more than any other candidate did. (In comparison, Dobos raised less than half that in his two board races combined.) Four years later, she did even better, receiving nearly $200,000 in contributions, with Columbus Blue Jackets owner John McConnell ($20,000), Miranova developer Ron Pizzuti ($1,500) and Abigail Wexner ($4,000) appearing in her campaign finance reports.
Also a bit strange was that such powerful people—deep-pocketed folks usually not associated with an elected office that pays just more than $300 per month—would put their money behind such a raw political newcomer. Moss made hay of Hightower’s inexperience during the 1999 campaign—calling her a tool of downtown business interests—and would continue to battle her over the next four years. In 2001, he demanded that she resign from the board’s presidency after news reports revealed that school administrators bypassed standard practice when they transferred her son from a neighborhood elementary to an alternative school. (Hightower has said she didn’t realize that the process was out of the ordinary.)
In their most notorious confrontation, Moss banged a shoe on a board table for 25 minutes during a 2003 board meeting. He was angry that Hightower disbanded a technology committee that he headed and claimed she was trying to cover up an Ohio Ethics Commission investigation of a former employee accused of influence peddling.
But Hightower never backed down to Moss. Shortly after she was elected to the board, she and Moss met for breakfast. “It was like a sparring session,” she recalls. “He told me, ‘This is who I am. This is what I do.’ And in a very nice sort of way, ‘Stay out of my way.’ I said, ‘This is who I am. This is what I will do. And I can take a punch.’ ”
Their last showdown was over Hightower’s relationship with Hammond, another of her prominent friends. When he was City Council president in the 1980s, Hammond was one of Columbus’s top black leaders, but scandals eventually soured him on public life and he stepped down from office in 1990. Today, Hammond remains a well-connected insider and heads Hammond & Associates, a Columbus lobbying and public relations firm.
Hightower considers Hammond a friend, confidant and mentor and consults with him regularly. “I would be doing myself and the community a disservice by not going to him and saying, ‘Jerry, you’ve been in these kinds of predicaments before. You have a history on this issue. Give me your take and perspective.’ ”
Others have a different view. Moss refused to be interviewed for this story. But in November, he called Hammond “unsavory,” and he and other black leaders in the 1980s accused Hammond of selling out the school district in negotiations with billionaire Les Wexner’s team of New Albany developers. Also in the ’80s, two grand juries investigated remarks Hammond made during a council meeting in which he seemed to demand campaign contributions in return for voting in favor of a “stupid” rezoning. (No charges were filed.)
Last November, on Election Day, the school board awarded a $115,000, six-month contract to Hammond & Associates and MurphyEpson. The two companies, which jointly bid for the job, beat out three other finalists to do the PR work for the nearly $400 million building project voters had approved the year before. Two years earlier, Hammond had sponsored a controversial breakfast meeting at Hightower’s house to introduce minority contractors to the school district’s new chief operations officer Don Haydon, who has since left Columbus.
The PR contract outraged Moss. He accused Hightower and Larry James, who then co-chaired the school district’s building project oversight panel, of using their influence to help a friend. “This is the same guy that threw a party at Hightower’s house,” Moss said then. “This is the same guy who was the best man at Larry James’s wedding, who was her campaign treasurer. It’s incestuous, isn’t it?”
An official from a political watchdog organization agrees, even though school leaders don’t appear to have broken any ethics rules by approving the contract. “It stinks,” says Catherine Turcer, legislative director for Ohio Citizen Action, who calls friendship a “gray area” for public officials. “It looks bad.”
James says he and Hightower haven’t done anything “even remotely” wrong. “The ethics codes have never, ever considered or suggested that friendship was a disqualifier,” says James, who stepped down as co-chairman of the oversight panel in late February to lead the school district’s fundraising efforts for a proposed levy campaign. “Never.” Hammond has a more succinct response to Moss’s claims: “It’s bullshit.”
Hightower says she had relationships with all of the finalists, not just Hammond. So if friendship disqualifies candidates, then only an outside firm with no community ties could get the job. “Why would we want an outside firm that has no connection to the community doing community relations work?” she asks. “That is the whole purpose; we need somebody to help bring the community in.”
Gene Pierce, a political consultant and public relations man who has worked for the district in the past, was one of the finalists for the building project PR job. He says, “Would I have liked to have had the business? Yes. Did I feel the process was squirrelly? No.”
This is not a happy place. Dour parents file into the auditorium at Brookhaven High School on a Wednesday evening in February. Each receives a packet of information detailing $65 million in proposed budget cuts for the Columbus school district. That means fewer teachers, fewer programs, perhaps no winter and spring sports.
More than 100 people show up for the hearing, the first of six community meetings the school board will host in February and March to discuss the district’s financial troubles. The turnout is bigger than expected, and a custodian quickly sets up more chairs.
The meeting has two goals: to give parents a chance to question school officials about budgets cuts and offer suggestions, and to sell a new operational levy the school board plans to put on the November ballot.
On this day, Hightower mostly defers to her colleagues. She welcomes everyone, introduces school administrators and board members and summarizes a few recent accomplishments. She plays the role of coach and lets Jeff Cabot, the board’s financial expert, and superintendent Gene Harris do most of the heavy lifting.
Cabot, the former administrator of Franklin County government, has emerged as one of the board’s most influential members over the past three years. His rise is largely thanks to Hightower’s independent streak. A Republican, Cabot ran Dorothy Teater’s 1999 campaign for mayor against Coleman—a campaign that some Democrats considered racist. Still, Hightower supported Cabot’s appointment in 2001, made him chairman of the board’s finance and operations committee and ran beside him as part of a team—which also included board vice president Karen Schwarzwalder, a Democrat, and newcomer Terry Boyd, a Republican—in the November school board election.
On this evening, all the school officials are on message, speaking in one voice, a kind of unity that’s new to the board, that seemed impossible before Hightower took over the presidency, forged bipartisan cooperation and knocked Moss from his perch. Boyd sits in Moss’s former chair, listening quietly to testimony instead of banging a loafer on a table and accusing his colleagues of corruption The board’s lone remaining maverick, Heard, isn’t at the meeting either. Two weeks earlier, she’d had a kidney transplant; in late February, it wasn’t clear when she would return to the board.
The board’s sales pitch seems to get through on this night. Parent Lisa Dove spends her three minutes at the lectern defending a string-instrument program that’s slated to be cut. But in closing, she urges everyone to support the proposed levy. The remark gets one of the loudest cheers of the night. Hightower smiles.
Dave Ghose is a staff writer for Columbus Monthly.
