Candidate for
Board Member; Sequoia Union High School District

Allen Weiner has devoted his entire professional life to public policy, education, and public service.

Allen is a longstanding member of the Menlo Park community. He was elected to the Governing Board of the Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD) in 2011 and currently serves as Board President. The Presidency is ordinarily a one-year rotating position, but Allen was elected in the fall of 2014 to a second consecutive term as President, reflecting his fellow Board members' confidence in his leadership.

Allen is the father of three children who graduated from or attend Menlo-Atherton High School: Evan, a senior at Harvard University; Josh, a sophomore at Wesleyan University; and Katie, a senior at Menlo-Atherton.

As someone who grew up attending diverse working-class public schools in his hometown of Denver, Colorado, who went on to become an honors graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, and who now teaches at Stanford University, Allen understands what young people need to succeed in today's global economy. He believes nothing is more important to our society's future than the success of our schools.

Allen has worked hard during his first term to making the SUHSD Board more effective and strategic in providing real leadership for the District. An effective Board needs to be able to set clear strategic priorities, to develop standards for evaluating whether our school are meeting our goals, to critically evaluate what is working and what isn't, and -- when necessary -- to make tough decisions to change what's broken.

Outside of his service on the SUHSD Board, Allen is a distinguished scholar and educator. He is Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, where he also serves as Director of the Program on International and Comparative Law and also as Co-Director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. He is the published author of a casebook on international law and many scholarly articles and book chapters.

Allen was also a high school history teacher in New York State before attending law school. In addition, before being elected to the School Board, he was active in the volunteer community at Menlo-Atherton High School, where he worked as a tutor in English Language Development classes.

In addition to his service on the SUHSD Board, Allen is on the Board of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, he served for 11 years as a lawyer in the State Department, in Washington DC and at the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands. He understands how to analyze complex policy and management challenges, how to develop workable solutions, and how to build a consensus among key constituencies to implement those solutions. He is a skilled lawyer and an experienced negotiator. Allen is a three-time winner of the State Department's Superior Honor Award and earned the Federal Bar Association Younger Federal Lawyer Award in 1997.

Allen graduated from Harvard University (magna cum laude) and Stanford Law School (Order of the Coif + top 10 % of the class). He is married to Mary Dent, the former General Counsel of the Silicon Valley Bank and now a consultant on public policy issues. Mary is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Allen clerked for Judge John Steadman on the District of Colombia Court of Appeals.