Candidate for
Board Member; San Mateo - Foster City School District; 4 Year Term

My priorities as a school board member will be to do the following:

a. Restore order, cooperation, vision, and leadership to the school board. This new behavior should be reflected in the relationships between the collective board and the public, between the individual board members themselves, and between the board members and the district administration.

b. Hire a new district administration. This will require cooperation with our new superintendent and a delicate balance between allowing the superintendent to choose a staff with whom she can work and selecting staff who can work within our district regardless of who is our superintendent and who is on our school board.

c. Develop a new long-term educational plan. Our school district just reached the end of a seven-year strategic plan. We need to devise a new educational plan to guide our students to ever-improving academic performance. This plan needs to reflect the desires of parents, teachers, principals and site councils at individual schools as well as district goals plus state & federal requirement. This plan should not be simply the vision of our superintendent or our school board. The last strategic plan involved the efforts of several hundred people and took approximately 1½ years to complete. Our next strategic plan should be equally comprehensive. Because of the amount of time and effort required to produce such a plan, we need to start as soon as possible.

d. Give our teachers & staff a new pay raise. Our district currently has a 20% annual turnover rate in its teachers and staff. The primary reason for this turnover is the gross inequity between what we pay them and what it costs to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; the secondary reason is the ease of getting more money in a school district that has a lower cost of living. The entry salary in our district is approximately $33,000 per year and the median salary is approximately $46,000 per year. The median salary of a Silicon Valley technical / non-managerial employee is approximately $70,000 per year. Adjusted to ¾ time, this is approximately $53,000 per year. Coincidentally, this is approximately the minimum amount for a family of four to live in the bay area (not San Mateo); this is also approximately the average salary in nearby school districts such as San Mateo Union High School district. Increasing our average salary to this amount would constitute a 15% raise. Not so coincidentally, this is approximately the salary increase from our former superintendent to our new superintendent.

The challenge with providing this pay raise is getting the money. A 15% pay raise will require approximately $7,500,000 in additional funds to our district. As a trustee I will work with the SMFCSD Educational Foundation to involve the entire San Mateo & Foster City communities in a major fund-raising effort; I will encourage the SMFCSD Educational Foundation to hire a professional fund raiser for this purpose and vote to provide the maximum support allowed by law from the district; I will work to get commitments from our local newspapers to keep our community informed on the need for money and the ongoing status of contributions; I will vote to allow local businesses to sponsor school programs; I will work to coordinate fund raising efforts between individual school PTA's and the SMFCSD foundation; and I will work with the teachers' union, the staff's union, the district administration, and the SMFCSD foundation to determine an equitable distribution of these contributions (contributions cannot be directly used to pay teachers; they can be used to pay for some district programs; they can also be used to provide forgivable loans to teachers).

As a trustee I will lobby the state & federal government for funding equalization, PERS reduction, full funding of special education, and full GATE funding. This requires a statewide effort by all school districts and has been resisted in the past by our legislators. This could bring an additional $5,600,000 (approximately) to our district.

e. Build new district facilities at Turnbull Learning Academy. Currently our district administration facilities are in rented office space. Instead of wasting money on rent, we can build new facilities with money that has been set-aside by the district for this purpose as well as provided by the City of San Mateo; according to our former superintendent, the monthly cost for this would be less than the rent that the district is currently paying. The current board has offered to spend as much as $5,000,000 on property for these new facilities instead of using space on an existing school campus. This is not only a waste of tax dollars; it neglects a tremendous opportunity to improve a heavily burdened school.

Currently, 77% of Turnbull's students are second language learners; it students' SAT- 9 scores are in the 36th percentile; 90% of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches; the PTA might be able to raise $1000 annually in contributions; and the campus is heavily used by the community for extra curricular activities. This compares to other schools in the district with 40% or fewer second language learners; SAT-9 stores above the 60th percentile; 40% or fewer students receiving free or reduced lunch; $100,000 or more in annual PTA contributions; and little extra-curricular use of facilities.

To improve the maintenance of this school, increase its exposure to all parents in the SMFCSD, attract more native-English-speaking students to its educational program, and improve the education of the existing students, as a trustee I would vote to build new district facilities on this campus. Because of the magnitude of such an undertaking, I would vote to establish a committee of parents, teachers, neighborhood representatives, community representatives, administrators, and consultants to determine the final form of such facilities. In addition to providing offices for the district administration, these new facilities could provide a boardroom that serves as a community meeting location, GATE classrooms, counseling facilities, et cetera.