Cookie Scott
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Glenn Youngkin seems to be intent on replacing members of higher education boards of education appointed by his Democratic predecessors just because.
Case in point: N.H. “Cookie” Scott. Scott was one among the first Black students to enroll at Longwood University in Farmville in 1968 and the first to graduate four years later. She was a sociology major and was a psychiatric social worker before joining the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC). In that agency, she worked her way up to Deputy Director for Administration. When she retired in 2018, she was overseeing several departments in an agency that had a total budget of $1.2 billion and over 12,000 employees. In 2019, Governor Northam appointed her to the Board of Visitors of Longwood. [Disclosure: as the DOC analyst with the Department of Planning and Budget, I worked with Cookie for many years and was on friendly terms with her.]
So, an accomplished Black woman with no partisan ties and no political contributions (at least none reported by the Virginia Public Access Project), was not reappointed. It is not as if the new Youngkin appointees to the Longwood Board of Visitors had any higher education administration or oversight experience or, lacking that, any experience with state government, the General Assembly, or managing a large public bureaucracy with a billion-dollar budget and thousands of employees.
There is Kathryn Roberts. She is the chief financial officer of a small development company in South Boston headed up by her husband. She does have in her favor that she is a Longwood graduate.
Jeffrey Nottingham is the “Regional Modulator Leader” of Interventional Cardiology and Radiology at GEHealthcare. (It would seem that government has nothing over private industry as far as vague and important-sounding titles go. I assume that he sells X-ray machines and related devices.) He also is familiar with Longwood and Farmville. He is a graduate of the small, all-men’s private school down the road, Hampden-Sydney College.
Finally, there is Brian Schmalzbach. He is a partner with McGuireWoods, otherwise known as the “shadow government” of Virginia. Enough said.
As I said at the beginning, just because.
