Candidate for
Board Member; Gilroy Unified School District

·Occupation: Office Manager

·Parent of 3 Gilroy High School graduates, 1 GHS student

·B.A., Barnard College

·Gilroy High School Parent Club, Founder and Treasurer

·Rucker School Parent Club President, Theatre Arts Program President, School Site Council

·Odyssey Theatre Company (OTC), Board of Directors and Founder. OTC is a non-profit educational theatre company created to support the theatre arts curriculum in the Gilroy Unified School District.

·The Alliance For Academic Excellence, Position Paper Co-Author. The Alliance For Academic Excellence is a grassroots organization of parents, teachers, and community members that advocates for academic rigor at Gilroy High School.

·Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) Advisory Committee

·Arts & Entertainment columnist, The Gilroy Dispatch

·Selected to be the parent representative on numerous district committees

I was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1950, and grew up there until I left for college. My mother still lives in the same home where we moved when I was age 3, and I have many family and personal ties to the Boston area. I graduated in 1968 from Brookline High School and in 1972 from Barnard College with a double major in government and urban studies. I then did research in an orthopedic clinic at the Children's Hospital in Boston.

In 1975, I met my husband, Marty, who had completed his military service and was finishing up his last year of residency in internal medicine. The time had come for both of us to leave the snow, ice, freezing temperatures and wind chill factors and head for sunny California. Here I have worked with my husband to establish his medical practice and manage his office. We have four sons, and I have devoted my life to raising them. This included focusing on their education and becoming an active parent volunteer in their classrooms.

Our children are now all over the United States. Thank goodness for email! Dan, 25, is a 1997 GHS graduate, a 2001 Harvard graduate, and will be a 2005 graduate of University of Virginia School of Law where he is Editor-In-Chief of the Law Review. Joshua, 23, is a 1999 GHS graduate, a 2003 Harvard graduate, and a second-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. Joe, 21, is a 2001 GHS graduate and a senior majoring in economics at Harvard. David, 16, is currently a junior at Gilroy High School.

Since we moved to Gilroy in 1986, I have assumed leadership roles in School District issues related to the classroom experience and academic reform. As a strong supporter of arts in the schools, I am a founder and board member of Odyssey Theatre Company, a non-profit educational theatre company created to support the theatre arts curriculum in the Gilroy Unified School District.

Since 1996, I have been active in The Alliance For Academic Excellence, a grassroots organization of parents, teachers, and community members that promotes academic rigor at Gilroy High School. This group has made several presentations before the School Board on behalf of academic reform and credits my leadership role for many positive changes, including the reinstitution of an Honors Program at Gilroy High School and the adoption of a new language arts curriculum. In January 2003, I co-authored and presented to the School Board The Alliance's Position Paper.

My children have attended Las Animas School, Rucker School, South Valley Junior High School, Brownell Academy, and Gilroy High School. At these schools I served on school site councils and was an officer on all their parent club boards. I have been selected by the District to serve as the parent representative on many district committees. For years I served as president of the Rucker Theatre Arts Program and volunteered in classrooms for Arts Alive, a program that brings fine arts experiences to elementary school children.

My 18 years as a parent in the District have provided me with a great deal of knowledge about how GUSD works and how decisions are made. My successes as a parent activist prove that I have the leadership skills to represent and advocate on behalf of the parent community on the school board.