Candidate for
Board Member; Morgan Hill Unified School District

I was raised in the family of a machinist in Connecticut, the eldest of six kids. I was educated in a great public school system in a town just like Morgan Hill. I got a large scholarship to go to college and earned a B.A. with High Honors at Wesleyan University in a multi-disciplinary major in economics, government and history and did historical research for two summers in Mexico City.

My first job after college was as an arts and crafts instructor at a Mendocino residential treatment center for autistic children. I then went on to graduate school and I earned a Master's and Ph.D. in psychology from Berkeley's Wright Institute, and also an advanced degree in education.

I've taught for ten years--at UC Berkeley, where I taught finance and policy classes, in the community colleges and also English as a Second Language in Taiwan.

I later managed an $80 million payroll for five years negotiating 12 labor contracts for 60 work sites. So I know a lot about education as well as how to run a business efficiently in a unionized environment such as our MHUSD. School Board members negotiate these contracts in partnership with the Superintendent, and we are responsible for setting school policies.

I am an expert on leadership and I have coached and developed hundreds of Silicon Valley leaders. I trained 150 community leaders over an eight year period as program head for Leadership Morgan Hill, and each year we would devote our first month to studying the Morgan Hill Unified School District and its schools.

I am married to a wonderful woman who was born in Taiwan and am the father of two college-age sons who are science majors, and I have lived in Morgan Hill for over 21 years. Together with my whole family, I have been an active volunteer with our schools, with PONY League baseball and with the Fourth of July parade and with AAUW. I speak conversational Spanish, Chinese and French.