Florence spent six terms helping shape Plano’s future before earning a seat in the Texas Senate

In 1979, when Florence Shapiro decided to run for Plano City Council, the encouragement she got was well-meaning but telling.

“Several people called and said, ‘You need to run for city council. You can run for the woman’s seat,’” she recalls. “I look back on that now, and it’s not quite so clever. There isn’t and never should be a ‘woman’s seat.’”

She ran anyway and won, stepping into the seat vacated by Louise Sherrill, the only woman on the council at the time. It was the beginning of a career that would span more than three decades and track the growth of an entire city.

A City Growing Alongside Her

Florence was born in New York City to two Holocaust survivors and moved to Dallas as a young child. She graduated from Hillcrest High School, became the first in her family to attend college and earned a degree in secondary education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1970. She taught English and speech at Richardson High School before founding her own advertising and public relations agency, Shapiro & Company, which she eventually closed after a decade due to the demands of public office.

She and her husband, Howard, moved to Plano in 1972 while he was in law school at SMU. Three years before entering politics, Florence founded the Plano Service League, now known as the Junior League of Collin County, starting with 13 women. “We did it because we saw the need,” she says. That league has since grown to more than 900 members.

Florence served six terms on the Plano City Council and remained the only woman on it for years until Ann Jones was elected in 1990. During that stretch, Plano grew from a bedroom community of roughly 17,000 residents to a city approaching 300,000. Florence became the city’s first female and first Jewish elected mayor in 1990, a role she held until 1992. By then, she says, the dynamic around her gender had shifted. “By then, my gender never seemed to be a deterrent, nor was it of great value,” she says.

From Plano to the Texas Senate

At the 1991 Cotton Bowl Parade, her friend Kay Bailey Hutchison, then the Texas state treasurer, encouraged her to run for the Texas Senate. Florence won a close runoff election in 1992 and went on to represent Collin County for two decades, first District 2 and later District 8. In 2005, she was elected president pro tempore, becoming second in the gubernatorial line of succession and the first senator from Collin County to hold that position in more than 40 years. That April, when both the governor and the lieutenant governor were out of state, Florence served as governor for a day, only the sixth woman in Texas history to do so.

Ask Florence what she is most proud of from her time in the Senate, and the answer comes without hesitation: Ashley’s Laws. In 1993, 7-year-old Ashley Estell was kidnapped from Carpenter Park in Plano, assaulted and murdered. Florence authored a package of 12 bills in 1995 that increased penalties for sex offenders and required police departments to publicize offenders’ locations after release, among other measures.

“The Plano community really rallied around Ashley’s family,” she says. “And they remain a big part of the community still to this day.”

Still at the Table

Florence announced in 2011 that she would not seek reelection, closing out a Senate career that ran from 1993 to 2013. She remains active, serving on state education boards, on the Communities Foundation of Texas board and as a lifetime director of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. She has also served on the boards of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Children’s Medical Center and UT Southwestern Medical Center and was recently named the board chairperson for Frisco’s Kaleidoscope Park.

But most days, her joy revolves around the simple pleasure of spending time with her family. Howard, her husband of 47 years, has practiced law in Plano for decades, previously serving as a municipal judge and an assistant district attorney in Collin County. Two of their three children followed him into the profession. Their son, Todd, works with Howard as an attorney at The Shapiro Law Firm and has appeared on television and radio as a legal expert in high-stakes cases. Their oldest daughter, Lisa, practices law in Houston, while their youngest daughter, Staci, is a stay-at-home mother of five in Plano. “I am proud of each of them and the people they have become,” Florence says. The couple also has 12 grandchildren, who she says are thoroughly loved and spoiled.

There is no more talk of a woman’s seat in Plano today. Instead, the council meets inside a room renamed in 2013 as the Senator Florence Shapiro Council Chambers, a seat that carries her name outright, no qualifier attached.

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Florence Shapiro is one of Local Profile’s 25th annual Women in Business Summit presented by Bank of America on Sept. 18 at the Hilton Granite Park Hotel, Plano. She will join seven other powerhouse women for a full day of inspiring conversations, networking and more.

Tickets are sold out — join the waitlist now!

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