League of Women Voters of California
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Full Biography for Mary Lou Zoglin
Candidate for |
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Mary Lou Zoglin 1424 Miramonte Avenue Mountain View, California 94040 650/960-3015 mlzoglin@mciworld.com http://www.zoglin.com
BIOGRAPHY
Mary Lou Zoglin was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, the child of a high school teacher father and a homemaker mother. Her family, like the great majority of the inhabitants of York (population: 55,000), was of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. The Pennsylvania Dutch are best known for their hard work and their thriftiness, characteristics which mark Mary Lou to this day. Her first appeal to the voters was at age 10, when the sixth graders at Madison Elementary School elected her as May Queen.
Mary Lou attended Radcliffe College (now absorbed into Harvard), majoring in French and Spanish but learning that she most enjoyed her elective courses in political science. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa while also spending much time generally enjoying the college scene. Upon graduation, she received a Fulbright grant for a year's study at the University of Brussels, where she continued her studies in political science, this time in French. The following year, still not ready to come home and settle down, she worked for the United States Army in Germany as an editor and traveled throughout Europe.
Mary Lou returned to New York City to work for The Rockefeller Foundation as a translator and editor and there met her husband-to-be, Stanton Zoglin, then an intern at Bellevue Hospital. They married the following year and moved first to Nashville, Tennessee and then to Seattle, Washington in search of the perfect place to make their home. While Dr. Zoglin completed his training in internal medicine, Mary Lou completed her MA and taught French at Vanderbilt University and world history in a Seattle high school.
Fortunately, relatives in San Jose invited them to come for a visit. One trip to the Bay Area was all it took to realize that here was the perfect place they had been seeking. Dr. Zoglin soon began to practice in the new medical offices at the corner of Miramonte and Cuesta in Mountain View. For the next few years, Mary Lou was active in many local organizations while raising their three children, John, Katie, and Bill.
Mary Lou was then elected to the Foothill/DeAnza Community College Board of Trustees, where she served for 13 years. DeAnza College was planned and built during her tenure on the Board, where she was always an advocate for "trying new things." In particular, she promoted programs to encourage women to return to college, to smooth the way for members of all ethnic groups to enter the college, and to provide the skills workers needed to enter and advance in the workforce. Mary Lou was elected president of the California Community College Trustees Association and served on many state-level committees. In recognition of her leadership, she was appointed by the Governor to the statewide Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges. During this period she wrote a book entitled Power and Politics in the Community Colleges, an analysis of college governance used by students in graduate programs throughout the country.
Soon thereafter Mary Lou, recently widowed, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the Administration of Higher Education at UC-Berkeley. She graduated shortly after the passage of Proposition 13, a very difficult time financially for community colleges. Her first job was in Sacramento, working as a lobbyist for the community colleges in search of funding to replace the property tax revenue lost under Prop 13. Although an intense and stimulating learning opportunity, lobbying was a frustrating and often downright unpleasant task for someone who likes to see concrete outcomes from her work.
As a result, Mary Lou was delighted to take a position as Dean of Instruction at Coastline Community College in Orange County, in charge of what was then the largest television course program in the country. A few years later she became Vice-President for Instruction, responsible for the education of some 15,000 students. One of her major accomplishments there was the development of a program which assisted local firms to enter the international market. This program received federal backing and was adopted as a model by community colleges nationwide.
Mary Lou retired from her position at Coastline in order to return to the Bay Area and resume her life as a community volunteer. Shortly thereafter, she put out the word that she was available to work with any groups or agencies that needed help. It took all of two weeks for her to be picked up as volunteer Executive Director of Mountain View/Los Altos Healthy Ventures, a collaborative of 21 schools, nonprofit agencies, the city, clinics and hospitals, and the YMCA and YWCA, working for the health and well-being of children and families. During her seven years in this position, Healthy Ventures has initiated many valuable programs, among them the placing of outreach workers in the schools to help families connect with medical care and the provision of dental education and screening for young children. In 1996 Healthy Ventures received the Mountain View Mayor's Award. The collaborative has just received a grant to work with the Santa Clara County Health Department to design ways of making health services more accessible to Mountain View residents. Mary Lou was honored with the "Friend of Mountain View Schools" award in 1996 and the "Champion of Youth" award in 1998.
Mary Lou Zoglin was elected to the Mountain View City Council in 1996 and served as Mayor of the city in 1999. Her special interests have led her to serve on the Neighborhoods, Youth, and Moffett Field Committees of the Council. In particular, she has promoted the role of the city in providing after school homework and recreation programs to fill in the unstructured hours when school is out and there are often no adults in the home. These hours are the peak times for juvenile crime and violence, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and involvement with gangs. The schools do not have the funding to lengthen their days, and parents often work into the early evening. Thus, Mary Lou feels that the best investment our city - and our society as a whole - can make is to provide an alternative which lets young people interact with caring adults, develop healthy bodies, and find interesting leisure-time activities. Believe it or not, Mary Lou likes to do a lot of things besides community work. Travel comes first: favorite trips have included a trek in Nepal, hiking the Milford Track in New Zealand, a summer-long Fulbright Seminar in Korea, and visits to China, Tibet, Japan, Australia, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South America. Visits to different parts of Mexico are scheduled as frequently as possible, usually about every other year. Tennis (singles, to pack the most exercise into the time available), music, ballet, hiking, and the theatre are other favorite avocations, and she hopes to resume her weekly trips to the library as soon as the campaign is over.
RESUME Education B.A., Radcliffe College - French and Spanish Community Activities Current Professional Activities Executive Director, Mountain View/Los Altos Healthy Ventures,1993-Present Publications Who Shapes the Curriculum: An Examination of Honors Friend of Mountain View Schools" Award Personal Widow, three adult children |
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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 20, 2000 11:24
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League of Women Voters of California Education Fund.
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