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Full Biography for Jean Quan
Candidate for |
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Jean Quan is the first Asian American woman to be elected to the Oakland City Council. She is currently serving as Vice Mayor. She Chairs the Finance and Management Committee and serves on the Life Enrichment, Public Works, and Public Safety Committees of the Council. She represents Oakland at ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Government, the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, and on the board of Safe Passages, a collaboration of the county, school district and city organized to improve services that keep children safe and healthy. She is the city representative to the League of California Cities and sits on the Community Services Committee. She is also a member of the Asian Pacific American Municipal Officials of the National League of Cities and has been appointed to sit on the Immigration Task Force. In her 3 Years as Council member she has played a leadership role in:
Jean helped re-establish the City Education Partnership Committee and has been a member for most of the last ten years, improving City-Schools collaboration on preschool, library, after school, public safety, traffic and pedestrian, recreation, and job training programs. She continues to serve on this committee now as a councilmember. Jean was former Councilman Spees' representative on the City Budget Advisory Committee. She worked with the City's Public Ethics Commission process to develop the recent campaign reform measures and has served on the Emergency Planning Board from its founding (1993-2003) to develop a citywide response to possible earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. As part of the Homeless Commission's education committee, she helped develop a master plan for homeless youth and families. Advocate for Youth and Public Education After years of parent organizing, Jean was elected to represent District 4 on the School Board from1990 to 2002. She was one of the first Asian Americans elected to the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education and was past president. As a Board member she led many education reform efforts, including the restoration of music and arts, class size reductions, higher graduation standards & community service requirements, school-to-career programs and modernizing playgrounds. She led campaign efforts for two facility bond measures totaling half a billion and two parcel tax measures which provide over $14 million annually to classrooms. Jean is recognized nationally as a spokesperson for immigrant and urban children as Chair-Emeritus of the Council of Urban Boards of Education of the National School Board Association, Council of Great City Schools Executive Committee Member, and as past president of the Association of California Urban School Districts and the Asian Pacific Islander School Board Members Association. She chaired the 1995 California School Boards Association (CSBA) Annual Conference, introducing educational technology as a major theme, and the first CSBA Symposium on Asian Pacific Islander issues. She is a member of the National Marcus Foster Educational Institute Board. Jean is a National Kellogg Foundation Fellow. She was also a founding member of the Friends of Hibakusha, a nonprofit organization helping Japanese American atomic bomb survivors, the Asian Pacific Labor Association, and Asian Americans for Justice. She is affiliated with many civil rights organizations and served on the Alameda County Medical Center Foundation and on the Oakland Red Cross Board. Her professional affiliations include serving as division director for the northern California hospital and health workers union and as a representative for social worker and service unions in the Bay Area. In health education, she worked as a New York City Hospital patient advocate and as a drug abuse prevention specialist in Los Angeles. Family and Oakland Roots Jean's family roots in Oakland date back to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake when her great-grandfather, grandfather and his two brothers took the ferry across the Bay and became part of a new Oakland Chinatown. Jean helped found Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied Chinese at Yale University in China. She is the mother of two Skyline High School graduates: William Huen, (Princeton University '99), currently a medical student in the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco (MS/MD) Joint Medical Program, and Lailan Huen, a recent Columbia University graduate. She has been married to Dr. Floyd Huen for over 35 years and they have raised their family in Oakland for the last 26 years. |
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Created from information supplied by the candidate: June 6, 2006 08:02
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