Candidate for
Member, Governing Board; San Bernardino City Unified School District

Willard Hughes is a former teacher and longtime volunteer with the California Cadet Corps, a National Guard youth leadership development program whose largest group of cadets is right here in San Bernardino. He has also at various times been a newspaper editor, a taxicab driver, a financial analyst, and a stay-at-home father of four children, all of whom are students in the San Bernardino City Schools. He represents Arrowview Middle School on the District Advisory Council, and currently serves as the co-chair of that body.

Willard was born in Kirkland, Washington, and moved with his family to Tokyo, Japan, at the age of 3 months. From kindergarten through grade 5, he attended Nishimachi International School, a private school that serves both Japanese and foreign expatriate families. Nishimachi stresses a true bilingual education in English and Japanese, and all students take classes in both languages each day with the goal of attaining fluency in both. Nishimachi has successfully used this model -- which we in San Bernardino call "dual-language immersion" -- for over 60 years.

Willard then moved to La Quinta, California, and attended middle school and high school in the Desert Sands Unified School District. Upon graduation, he attended UCLA and then taught the California Cadet Corps program at middle schools in Los Angeles Unified and Compton Unified. He then worked in the private sector in Los Angeles for a number of years, continuing his involvement with the Cadet Corps on a volunteer basis, before moving his new family to Montana, where he worked as a copy editor at the Great Falls Tribune.

In 2007, Willard was recruited by the San Bernardino City Schools to return to California and teach the cadet program at San Gorgonio High School, which he did during the 2007-08 school year. During his short tenure at San G, among other achievements, he had seven cadets win state-level Cadet of the Year awards and sent one cadet to the prestigious West Point Summer Leaders' Seminar at the U.S. Military Academy. Despite these successes, the district declined to renew his contract for a second year.

Since then, Willard has worked as a recruiter and supervisor for the U.S. Census Bureau, screening hundreds of prospective census-takers for employment and then supervising 150 field workers who went door-to-door conducting the national decennial census in 2010.

Willard is married to his best friend and former fellow cadet, Victoria, a San Bernardino native who is also a volunteer with the Cadet Corps program. They live in San Bernardino with their four children, Kenneth (a Pacific High School freshman who receives special-education services for Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism), Cheyenne (an Arrowview Middle School seventh-grader who is the company commander of her Cadet Corps class period), William (a Lincoln Elementary third-grader in the dual-language immersion program) and Edward (a first-grader in Bonnie Oehl Elementary's dual-language immersion program).