Larsen seeks seat on Metro board

Roger Larsen hopes his

career will help convince voters that he’s the best candidate for the Metropolitan Community College Board of Governors.

Larsen of Fremont is seeking a seat for the board’s first district.

Larsen, 65, taught German at Fremont High School for 23 years and was chairman of the school’s foreign language department. From 1987 until 2006, he worked as the director of the Nebraska State Education Association’s higher education division and director of the higher education institutional research.

Larsen is running against Carol Russell and Patrick Leahy, who currently sits on the Metro board. Since the

position is nonpartisan, the top two vote getters Tuesday will go on to face each other in the November general election.

Since 1990, Larsen has also worked as a consultant, both with the National Education Association Higher Education Research Cadre and independently.

In his later career, Larsen worked closely with college faculties to help them with contract negotiations and lobbied on behalf of higher education.

“I have a good sense of how community colleges operate and how community college presidents react with their boards,” he said, adding that he was dismayed at the

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recent problems the board had within the past two months.

“I was very concerned that the Metro board in the not very distant past was very chaotic,” Larsen said. “It distressed me to see. Metro is a good institution. I felt the faculty and students were being hurt by what was going on within the board.”

Within the past couple of years, the Metro board had been split over issues concerning president Jo Ann McDowell.

Larsen said the Metro board first district covers about the western third of Douglas County and all of Dodge County.

“I hope to provide a voice of stability to the board,” he said. “The board has been cast as dysfunctional.

“Community colleges are the gate to higher education. A lot of students go on to four-year schools. A lot go on to work training. Metro is an open door for many.”

Larsen said he thinks the two-year college can forge partnerships in town.

“Our vocational education programs at the high schools have for the most part disappeared. It seems to me there are partnerships Metro could make to strengthen some of the programs that high schools provide and to offer some programs that high schools don’t provide.

“Maybe there’s even an area where Metro and Midland Lutheran College can find partnerships to strengthen both institutions.”

Larsen graduated from Midland in 1964. He received master’s degrees in German and education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1971.

But he said he the career track he started wasn’t exactly what he started for.

After he graduated from Midland with a teacher’s degree, he was hired by Fremont Public Schools.

“I thought they hired me to teach chemistry,” he said. “I taught junior high science and German. I asked them what kind of German they wanted me to teach. They said conversational German. I had no idea how to do that.”

That summer, he borrowed money to fly to Austria where he brushed up on conversational German before teaching the program.