Candidate for
Board Member; San Mateo-Foster City School District

When you elected me four years ago, the district had no superintendent, six of the seven remaining administrators had resigned in protest, and one board member had resigned in protest at how the district was being governed. Our district was working on a 12 year old strategic plan. Our district was not teaching in accordance with state standards or using state approved textbooks. Our state was operating under a fifteen billion dollar annual deficit such that it was severely cutting funding to school districts. Our state economy was in shambles after the dot-com bust. And our country was reeling from the attack on the world trade center.

From this starting point four years ago, my fellow board members and I have overseen the hiring of a complete new top administration; the development of a strategic plan for the district's academic, administrative, financial, and physical operation; the revision of this strategic plan annually; the adoption of state standards and textbooks for every grade and subject; the development of a governance handbook for the internal functioning of the board of governors; the revision of this handbook annually; the passage of a local parcel tax to partially replace revenues taken from us by the state & federal government; the beginning of a process to eliminate a roughly thirty-million dollar unfunded liability for teacher retirement benefits; and the completion of an ongoing one-hundred-million dollar school modernization program on time and in budget that brought our facilities into the 21st century.

During this period of turmoil and change, my fellow board members and I cut roughly six-million dollars from the district's budget without appreciably affecting classroom size. With the exception of special education, all programs in the district have been restructured to operate within their allotted budgets or eliminated; we did cut the encroachment of our special education program roughly one million dollars while enduring cuts in funding and increased enrollment of severely handicapped students. We have restructured our after school programs to help our students with academic and social development and to add needed dollars to our district's general fund. We have also started a pre-school program that is designed to improve enrollment by attracting students who might otherwise go to private schools as well as enhance revenues. Furthermore, academic performance improved for virtually every school, grade level, subject, and social group.

In spite of this progress, challenges and opportunities await us in the future: the state is requiring that our students all be proficient or advanced in math and language arts within the next 9 years; the federal government is requiring that every social group - including non-English speaking and low socio-economic status children - make adequate yearly progress in accordance with the No Child Left Behind act. Not too surprisingly, we are legally required to do this with no increase in funding and with the state and federal government able to suspend funding as their budgetary whims decree. This will require research into the practices in every school and classroom in our district to identify what does and does not help these social groups, increased teacher training, increased intervention for at-risk students, and increased administrative oversight. This will also require the involvement of every parent in our district to help their children achieve academic proficiency.

On top of this required academic progress, our children must develop socially. To accomplish this goal, our district has adopted a leading-edge standard for social responsibility and our schools are in the process of implementing it. The board of governors has adopted the practice of expelling any student on credible evidence of risk to their fellow students. This, too, is an ongoing process that will require the dedicated effort of every parent.

I ask you to help me continue this progress and overcome these challenges. Even if you do not have children in our school district, good schools and well educated, socially responsible children affect the quality of the community in which you live and the quality of your life now and in the future.