Susan W. Krebs made history last week at her final school board meeting.

"I want everyone to look at their watches," the departing board president and newly elected state legislator told the audience at 7:45 Wednesday night.

"This is a historic moment. We are 15 minutes ahead of schedule, so if you'd like to add something to the agenda ... ."

Her voice trailed off as the room erupted in laughter.

The time designations ascribed to each item on the board's agendas have always been unreliable, but they have never been so far off track as they have during Krebs' tenure, when meetings that would begin at 5 p.m. sometimes would drag for six hours, school officials said.

But the mere fact that the five-member panel meets longer and more frequently than ever before reflects what is perhaps Krebs' most enduring accomplishment: Under her leadership and at her insistence, many parents and school employees say, the school board is delving more often and more deeply into the business of running the 28,000-student system.

"She has brought with her a tenacity that we'd never seen before," said Stephen Guthrie, who has worked for the school district for 20 years, climbing the ranks to assistant superintendent of administration. "If an issue is important to her, she will find a way to accomplish it through convincing staff, board members, parents or teachers.

"She was as aggressive in her pursuit of high standards during her first years on the board as she has been in her last year. And along the way, she won the support of other board members."

That was no small feat.

Krebs joined the board in January 1999 and quickly grabbed the spotlight from her colleagues, demanding accountability and second-guessing administrative decisions. More often that not, she found herself outvoted 4-1 on such key board decisions as transferring money between school projects, building a $35 million high school near Westminster and expressing formal support for former Superintendent William H. Hyde.

"My first two years on the board were spent reacting to problems caused by a lack of accountability measures and oversight by the prior Board of Education," Krebs, 42, wrote in an e-mail message in response to written questions after she refused to be interviewed by telephone.

"When I was elected, I had no idea of the problems that the school system was embroiled in," she wrote. "I was forced to bring many issues to the public because the former board and superintendent refused to acknowledge that there were any problems despite constant media [attention] and public criticism."

School officials bristled each time she publicly rebuked them as being unconcerned about bungled school construction projects that made the school system the target of multimillion-dollar lawsuits and a 19-month grand jury investigation, and for waiting three months to discuss an internal investigation that cost the board more than $200,000.

Four years later, many of Krebs' critics have become collegial, and rivals have come to respect her. Few illustrate that change better than longtime board member C. Scott Stone.

Two years ago, he responded to Krebs' nomination for board president with a venomous diatribe, criticizing his frequent adversary as "divisive," unable "to foster compromise or consensus" and ill-suited to lead the board. A year later, he insisted that he be allowed to nominate Krebs for a second term as board president. And last week, during Krebs' last board meeting, Stone not only orchestrated the delivery of a towering flower arrangement to Krebs' seat on the dais, but he also planted a kiss on her cheek during a brief recognition ceremony.

"The fairest thing to say is I made a mistake two years ago," Stone said. "Slowly but surely, I think, Susan and I found things we agreed on and common ground we could work on. We're both pretty tenacious and thorough. And we found that, if we put our two heads together, we could get just about anything done."

He now says the scrutiny Krebs demanded of the school administration was warranted and likens the situation to "not seeing the forest for the trees."

"It's difficult sometimes to accept things as quickly as you should or to accept that things have gone sour," he said. "Susan brought in a pretty bright spotlight and revealed that things, indeed, were more sour than the board was willing to acknowledge or understood. ... She brought just an unrelenting drive to require the superintendent and his staff to address school construction and curriculum changes in a fashion faster than they used to."

Since those rocky years, Krebs has recruited like-minded candidates to run for the board. She helped sign former Howard County Executive Charles I. Ecker as interim schools chief and then to a four-year appointment after Hyde quit with two years left in his term. She has focused the board on crafting policies that will improve student achievement and has taken the heat for unpopular budget decisions that she insisted were in the best interests of students.

Ecker praises Krebs' "forward thinking" in needling board members to write mission statements and draft goals with benchmarks by which they will measure the district's success.

Finksburg resident Stephen M. Nevin, who unsuccessfully sought a school board seat in 2000 and whose two daughters attend county schools, described her "resolve, reliability and reason" as "trademarks" and "qualities now used to describe what we're looking for in future board members."

Even facilities director Raymond Prokop, who most frequently has been the subject of Krebs' intense questioning, had nice things to say.

"She asked a lot of questions and she got involved in a lot of subjects right down to the nitty-gritty of construction projects," he said. "She brought up issues that were uncomfortable but needed to be discussed. ... And after the first flurry of controversies, she really became very supportive of the system and has always made sure she was there when we went to the Board of Public Works or the [county] commissioners for funding."

But the same candid manner that won her fans also got her in trouble at times.

Her blunt comments in an August interview with The Sun about teacher complaints - suggesting that employees who are "that unhappy [should] go somewhere else" - helped spur an ongoing work-to-rule job action at a dozen county schools, teachers say.

For some employees who work in the school system's administrative offices, Krebs' ascendance to the House of Delegates means an end to her two-hour phone calls. Similarly, they won't miss being called to the podium to be grilled by her at televised board meetings.

"We spent a lot of time for her," said one employee who did not want to be quoted by name for fear of alienating a soon-to-be member of the legislature who will have influence on the school system. "I think a lot of staff would say that they spent a lot of time answering a lot of questions, so people are relieved."

A second administrative office employee who requested anonymity for the same reason suggested that Krebs' absence will allow employees "time to get back to doing more of our jobs."

That concern seemingly was not lost on Krebs, who ran a home-based accounting firm for 12 years and then worked part time at a technology and financial management consulting firm before quitting her job in January 2001 when she became board president.

"I apologize for all of those of you I've given a hard time to over the years," she said at Wednesday's meeting. "But it's called accountability. It's called we're trying to do our job."

For Krebs, the job change means she can take many of the same pursuits higher up the governmental chain.

"This is not going to be an end, it's going to be a beginning," she said at last week's board meeting. "I'm going to take my knowledge and experience and passion for public education down to the State House and start pushing our agenda at a different level."