Helms enjoyed time serving school system

After 18 years serving in education, Sue Helms’ time has come to an end.

She was one of the original five members on the first Madison Board of Education 13 years ago.

Helms

“It’s been a great ride,” Helms said.

During her tenure with Madison City Schools, five new schools were built.

As a board member during the inception year of the system, Helms was meeting every week with the other members, without pay, for an entire year to jumpstart the system.

“It was charting new grounds because there was no checklist,” she said. “We had to do it all ourselves. I was the only with school background because I had been with the county. Everybody else were the business people, which was a great mix, but we were winging it for the most part.”

She said they made to decision to become and independent system because they weren’t receiving the amount of funding they thought they should.

The road to break away from the county school system came with some opposition and doubts.

“Everybody told us we would fail, from Ed Richardson who was the state superintendent at the time, on down,” she said. “Look at us now. Could you want a better school system?”

Before starting with Madison City Schools, she was a board member for Madison County School for five years.

Helms was born in New Jersey, grew up in Miami and started her career in banking in Atlanta.

Her husband, who worked for IBM, moved Helms, who was pregnant with a second daughter, to Huntsville.

She decided to become a stay-at-home mom and got involved with school activities.

“What else is there to do? Get involved with PTA,” she said.

She served as president at West Madison for a couple years before a city councilman knocked on her door one day and asked her to run for school board.

“He said ‘you know there’s a school board seat open and we need you to run,’” she said. “And that’s how it started.”

As she prepares to leave the board, she will take the 13-year history with her.

“When I go, things like how we became a system, though it’s written down in the perils of papers, there’s still things only I can remember because I was in those meetings,” she said. “History is history. You can’t change it, but you can’t live by it either you have to move forward.”