‘Board’ work coming to end for Robertson

The home of Bill and Anne Robertson is filled with memories.

It only takes a stroll down the hallway, or through the family room, into the dining room, to hear the history of special furnishings, photographs and award plaques.

While Anne will occasionally interject, it is usually Bill who has a story and does the talking.

According to his wife, that’s the way it has been since their beginning as a couple, in the Spring of 1953 at Murray State University.

Anne was giving consideration to her options in extending an invitation to a young college man, to a sorority dance. Her room mate, as fate would have it, suggested Bill Robertson.

“I didn’t even know him, really,” Anne said.

“I asked my room mate, who had actually dated Bill, what will we talk about?” Anne recalls.

“She said, oh, you don’t have to worry about that. He talks all the time,” she continued, “and he still does.”

The couple married in the summer of 1956, and at that time, Anne was working in the placement office of MSU.

“Mr. Lawrence Holland, the superintendent of Fulton Schools, called and said he was looking for a business teacher, an industrial arts teacher and a principal. I said well, Bill and I can do two of them,” she said.

Bill never intended to teach.

“I really hated school,” he said in an interview last week.

“I started to teach shop, and it kind of would go around that shop was just a dumping ground for dummies. Not in my shop class. I produced some great young men, Jimmy Newton, David Hazlewood, Johnny Jones, Roger Bone,” he recalled.

He went on to teach shop at Fulton City High School for 17 years, minus the one year the Berlin Wall went up, and his Reserve unit, the 100th, Elvis Star Division, which included approximately 3,000 Reservists, was called out.

Bill was a Sergeant.

He, his wife and three children under the age of six, packed up and moved to Fort Chaffee, in Fort Smith, Ark., where they resided with other military families in a mobile home community.

When they returned to Fulton, Mr. Robertson had his job waiting for him.

“My first year, we cleaned up that shop. There was a lot of broken down equipment, and 500 feet of lumber,” he said. But with the help of Johnny Jones and some other dedicated students, they transformed the shop into a place of beauty, so to speak, as the artfully cut, sanded, stained, polished and hewn walnut and cherry woods came to life, under his guidance and instruction.

He retired from teaching in 1971, and still has a fondness for the students he taught.

Many of them visited with him over the past two years, during his recuperation from a broken hip and stroke.

“There were many times, I would pay the shop fees for a student if they were not able to pay. I had one former student come to me years later and pay me back the $7.35 for shop fees that I paid for him once. There were times when I would give my students some of my clothes...you know kids know when you care about them, and when you don’t,” he said.

But his association with Fulton City Schools did not end there.

In 1974, he was elected to serve on the district’s Board of Education. He served, at that time, for four year.

In 2008, then Superintendent Diane Owen approached Bill about returning to the school board, as an appointee, and then he served three full four-year elected terms through 2020.

Last month, he addressed his fellow board members serving on the Fulton Independent Board of Education, and announced his resignation.

Over the course of his service on the Board of Education, he has served, also, as Director at Large and Regional Chair of the Kentucky School Board Association. He has also served on the State Safety Board, which governs safety procedures in school across the state. This year, he has to his credit, 398 hours in in continuing education through the KSBA, ultimately achieving the Class 5 level for Board members.

“I have tried to stress, throughout my time on the board, to be an effective school board member, you have to continue to be educated. The high points of being on the school board would have to include the KSBA conferences, because I would sit with people from out of town, who served on other school boards, and listen. There is so much to learn, and so many topics for classes to take, classes about taxes, classes about law, about fraud,” he said.

Mr. Robertson believes one of the best things which have transpired over the course of his years of serving on the board, was to take the power of hiring and firing out of the hands of the school board members and transfer that responsibility to the superintendent.

He also credits the hiring of a “good” Principal and “good” Superintendent as a necessity, in the overall success of the district.

“I also wish more people would come to board meetings. We recently had a large group of people attend board meetings, and it was good to look out there and see such a large audience,” he said.

In addition to serving on the Fulton Independent Board of Education and the KSBA board, Mr. Robertson has served on the Fulton Electric System Board and as a Fulton City Commission.

“I got more calls when I was serving as a city commissioner than I ever did when I served on the school board,” he said.

He and Mrs. Robertson have enjoyed their time together serving in the Rotary Club, for many years, his first invitation to join having been offered by Hunter Byrd Whitesell.

“I asked Mr. Charlie Thomas if I would be able to attend the Rotary Club meetings at noon. In my daily class schedule, it worked out, because I had a study hall and I assured him I could leave school, go to Rotary and be back before my next class started. It will be 50 year ago this September I joined, and 35 years active, in and out,” he said.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Robertson have served as Rotary’s District Governor, and Mrs. Robertson’s distinction as having been one of the first eight female District Governors in the world, has afforded the couple the opportunity to travel extensively, to numerous countries.