Dr. Robert Barker reflects on rewards and challenges of School Committee and career

In describing his day job as an infectious diseases scientist at Genzyme Corp., one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, Dr. Robert Barker opted for the phrase, “hugely rewarding, but extremely challenging.” Yet he could have just as easily been talking about his nine-year stint on the Canton School Committee, which officially ended Tuesday with the uncontested election of friend and former colleague John Bonnanzio.

Rob Barker

A former teacher himself who spent time on the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health, Barker served the schools for three consecutive terms before making the difficult decision not to run again this year. Part of it, he said, was due to the fact that he no longer had children in the system, with both of his daughters having graduated and moved on to college. At the same time, Barker said he felt that “nine years of an incredibly intensive volunteer experience” had taken its toll and that it was time for a break – at least for now.

Fittingly, Barker said it was people like Bonnanzio who made his time with the committee so worthwhile, as they all managed to set aside individual differences for the good of the students. In fact, Barker said he ran back in 2001 partly because the School Committee at that time had become almost “nonfunctional,” whereas the group he worked with was just the opposite – in his eyes, a “highly functional group that operated essentially by consensus.”

He credited people like the late Paul Matthews, whose pragmatism and people skills enabled unlikely partnerships to flourish – such as that of Barker and Bonnanzio, who were “miles apart politically.”

“I could probably count on, well, three hands by now, the number of votes that were split,” said Barker of his nine years on the committee.

Pointing to the recent superintendent search as a perfect example, he said members had a spirited debate with lots of disagreement before ultimately finding common ground with a candidate they could all support.

Barker said there were also several other rewarding moments as a School Committee member, including the initiation and successful completion of the $40 million high school renovation project, a series of “very effective” union negotiations that ended up significantly reducing health care costs for the town, and of course, the passage of a much-needed Proposition 2 ½ override in 2008.

Still, even with the override and the restorations that followed, Barker said that the school budget was almost never in great shape due to rising costs, and that committee members, to this day, continue to operate in a “perpetual state of worry” over what will be the next to go.

“At the simplest level, the budget is unsustainable as it is now,” he said, adding that the override was only a partial restoration and that “what we need now is a complete restoration.”

While some of his views may be unpopular – including his belief that Canton residents are not overtaxed – Barker, to his credit, has always stood by those views and plans to continue to be a voice for the schools as a voter at annual town meetings.

“I’m going to continue to be involved,” he said, “because I care about the town and care about the town’s educational responsibility.”

An accomplished scholar in his own right, Barker also has the good fortune of working in a field that is
“just filled with exciting intellectual challenges.”

Despite graduating from Yale University with a history degree, he ended up finding his way back to science through a professor of ornithology, who sent him to Africa to collect blood specimens of various bird species. Inspired by that experience, Barker went on to earn a master’s degree at Northeastern University before getting his PhD in molecular and cellular biology from Brown University.

Now at Genzyme, Barker spends most of his days researching treatments for malaria and other “neglected diseases,” yet he has also done projects on more common diseases such as clostridium difficile, a bacteria that causes severe diarrhea, and oral mucositis, a painful inflammation of the mouth and throat that is common in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation.

Barker said his work keeps him “fabulously fulfilled,” which may be surprising to some, considering that only 10 percent of experiments begun in the lab will ever make it as a viable treatment.

His very first project at Genzyme, for instance, made it to the final clinical trial phase before it was ultimately abandoned – after nine years of research, the equivalent of his entire tenure on the School Committee.

Still, while it might be tempting to allow such disappointments to overshadow the sometimes modest successes, the eternally optimistic Barker, who did not rule out a return to public service one day, stood by his original assessment:

“Huge challenges and hurdles, but hugely rewarding.”

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Posted by Jay Turner on Apr 8 2010. Filed under Features, News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.