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

Public education is essential to the proper functioning of our society. Poorly educated children cannot take their place as informed citizens nor can they obtain gainful, satisfactory employment.

The role of a Trustee is first and foremost to look out for the needs of the entire community in terms of the functioning of the school district. The Trustee isn't "the senator from San Mateo Park", but must represent all elements of Foster City and San Mateo.

The Trustee must be a good communicator, because all authority rests collectively in the joint action of the Board, not among individual members.

Trustees set policy and objectives for Administration, and then evaluate the results. This requires a balance between staying at an abstract level of policy-making and review and micro-managing matters which properly are the responsibility of Administration.

Many school boards err on the side of abstract policy-making, which I feel is not the best way to achieve continued educational improvement. I believe that a Trustee must be open and accessible to everyone in the community, whether concerned citizen, parent or district staff.

I believe strongly in standards-based education, when the standards are good. In California the State has developed a set of excellent, demanding standards for every subject area at every grade level. Recently, approved standards-based curricula have become available which match the State standards. And finally, we now have State tests which measure what children are expected to know at each grade level.

These tests are objective, in that 90% of the students at a given school could achieve Proficient and Advanced performance levels, or 90% of students could be a Below Basic levels. We can now really see how well we are doing as a district, by schools and by individual students.

When we hired our new superintendent, one of the reasons we selected her was that she had implemented a complete standards-based system at her K-12 unified school district in Nevada. She is in the process of doing the same thing for us. I support this effort very strongly, and believe that the positive results are already beginning to show up in our testing results.

I don't feel that I have any real political influence in Washington D.C., and very little influence on what happens in Sacramento. But I believe that I can have a great deal of influence over what happens in Foster City and San Mateo in terms of our public schools.

We have a good, solid base to build on with our existing schools. My goal is to help our district be the lighthouse for the entire Peninsula. Even though we are the lowest funded district per child in the county; through focused, disciplined attention to classroom education we can be one of the very best school systems in actually educating our children.