Cynthia (Cindy) Rushefsky was elected to a four-year term
in April 2007. She currently serves on the Public Involvement
Committee and the community Involvement committee. She is also
a non-voting member of the Police and Fire Pension Board.
Councilwoman
Rushefsky graduated from State university of New York at Albany
with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education. She was awarded
a National Defense Scholarship and attended Syracuse University
for two years in the Russian History program. For the next
twelve years, she raised her two daughters and taught at a
variety of jobs while her husband served in the United States
Air Force and furthered his own education. In 1981 Councilwoman
Rushefsky returned to school, attending Holland Law Center
of the University of Florida, and obtained her law degree in
1984.
In 1984, Councilwoman Rushefsky moved to Springfield,
Missouri, with her family and settled in the Rountree neighborhood.
She clerked for the Missouri Court of Appeals and then went
to work for the Greene County Prosecuting Attorney’s
Office. Before her retirement in June 2006, Councilwoman Rushefsky
handled a wide variety of cases from animal abuse to murder.
For nine years she was the attorney with primary responsibility
for cases involving child abuse and rape and she maintains
a strong interest in women and children’s issues. During
her tenure, she developed a protocol for child abuse investigations,
emphasized counseling and services for victims, developed standards
for videotaping children’s testimony in criminal cases,
pushed for SAFE examinations for child victims, and created
a team concept that laid the groundwork for the Child Advocacy
Center. She was a Board member for the Family Violence Center
and the Rape Crisis Center and a founding member of the Child
Fatality Review Team for Greene County.
In 1998 she received
the Woodruff Award for outstanding achievement in the area
of law enforcement in recognition of her numerous presentations
in and around Greene County on the dangers of clandestine methamphetamine
labs particularly as they affected children. In 2004 she was
named one of Missouri’s top
ten lawyers by Missouri Lawyer’s Weekly in recognition
of her successful efforts to defend Missouri’s mandatory
child abuse reporting law before the Missouri Supreme Court.
In 2006, she was called out of retirement to head an interagency
Task Force on Gangs and Violent Crime and direct a grand Jury
investigation of those issues.
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