Superintendent Performance

The school board has only one employee, the superintendent.

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Our current superintendent has rare skills that should not be overlooked. He believes and acts to eliminate both the achievement gap and social inequities in our district. He honors teachers. He acts with integrity and works tirelessly for Mountain View. 

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I will be upfront and say that I would vote to renew the superintendent's contract. MVWSD's first-time superintendent has never worked for a board that supports his growth as a leader. Until the board steps up their oversight of his leadership, it's premature to judge the superintendent. 

I strongly believe in 360 surveys. The current district survey asks staff opinion of leadership without separating out district and school site. I will work to include questions specifically on the district leadership and specifically on the superintendent. 

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I do, however, advocate for a two-year extension, rather than the four-year contracts the current board uses. I do not support home loans or health benefits in excess of other staff. I will work to transfer the superintendent's district funded home loan to a private lender and to require the superintendent to pay the same health co-pays as the rest of the staff.​

 

Effective Board Governance

5 goals to improve public engagement and trust in school decisions.

1) Reestablish the old tradition of rotating board leadership rather than the current partisan process.

2) Reestablish that the board commands the parliamentary procedures of their board meetings, not district staff. Within those procedures, the board president facilitates the board with no more power than any other trustee. Staff, board members, and the public should be extended respect, especially when there are disagreements.

3) Have a maximal approach towards open meetings, so closed session items that are legally permitted to be discussed in open be done in the open with public input.

4) Have a maximal view towards public engagement that ensures everyone is welcome to share.

5) Keep a consistent transparent process for all large spending and instructional adoptions, rather than only applying transparency to statutorily required areas.

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Policies to Promote Anti-Racism

The most powerful way for schools to be anti-racist is to provide the best education to minority students. In the case of Mountain View, there is no excuse for an achievement gap. 5 goals to reduce racism.

 

1) Ensure every student receives a high-quality education. During COVID-19, this starts with eliminating the digital gap. The next more important step is not to expect less academically of minority students during this crisis.

 

2) Empower teachers to audit their own curriculum with a lens toward diversity and equity. Provide resources and grants for teachers and students to innovate in creating diversity experiences. Provide restorative justice training for principals.    

 

3) Provide cross-district affinity groups for students and staff, and fund their attendance to broader conferences to widen their communities.  

 

4) Annually survey and focus group minority staff and students to identify successes and opportunities.

 

5) Continue to improve under-enrolled neighborhood schools through targeted innovation funds, in order to reach the goal of truly local neighborhood schools.

Special Education

Most urgently, in this pandemic, on a case by case basis, we should already be open for in-person instruction for special needs. The state does not require a waiver for this situation anymore, each day we delay is unnecessary and urgent developmental losses. The board can do this right now with voluntary teachers. 

While needs are as diverse as the children seeking special education supports, the one thing in common is that success requires parent collaboration, so parents must be viewed as allies. There needs to be a district examination why some parents have not had a collaborative experience with the district.

School climate and SEL should also get more school board time than test scores. Without SEL, school is not a safe place for any student. Inclusion can be powerful for many cases, but really only if a culture of appreciating diverse learning profiles and self-advocacy is promoted for all children in a classroom.

Children need to see from K-8 examples of successful and diverse individuals like Temple Grandin and Peter Thiel. The power of highlighting ethnically diverse role models applies to highlighting role models with disabilities, the board can broaden its inclusion goals to include this.

In the middle schools, we should have an expanded role for a learning center, where all students can access supports to become more successful learners. I believe the existing innovation hubs at each middle school could house such a bolder effort. The learning center should be a centrally, physical place that inspires people, the board can fund this.

The school board should have an annual study session that invites parents to take part in a design thinking experience to learn what children experience and continue to tweak our methods of supporting students.

In my sixteen years of teaching, I've seen each of these ideas above work at where I teach. I worked at an inclusive school where over 50% of the students had IEPs, on a personal level, I am dyslexic myself, and am a parent with a child with special needs.​

 

Choice Programs

I believe there should be more choice (strong thriving neighborhood schools is an important choice too), in recognizing each child and family is different, and we should find ways to keep families within the MVWSD community when there are enough families seeking the same choice to offer a community option.

Every choice should strive for equity, and I 100% believe the leaders of each choice school do, but they can't do it alone. The district needs to step up to help advertise choice programs to underserved parts of MV, the district knows the incoming families, the choice programs do not.

Stevenson should be paying close attention to this election since there are many upcoming issues that affect them, and they deserve candidates to be upfront with their thinking.
-I believe the sibling preference creates community and should be kept.
-I believe that it's worth exploring ways to prioritize under-enrolled demographics in the enrollment process. Related to this is worth exploring regional balance in the enrollment process.
-I believe that the messaging of parent participation should be changed to reflect the reality that it's already a flexible requirement, but on the surface, no working parent wants to feel they are neglecting their duties, so we need to ensure working families know that they are 100% welcome with non-site based options to help. At its core, Stevenson is about progressive education, so PBL and SEL are as equal parts of that school as parent participation.

The oversubscription to Stevenson speaks to the desire in MV to see more progressive education at all schools. We need board members who understand that data-informed education alone leaves students unbalanced and undermines PBL. PBL is about choice and authentic work products that can't be easily placed in a metric for meeting data metrics, yet a focus on work product over testing would better prepare any student for the future. Dr. Rudolph brings an urban education lens that is helpful, but it must be balanced with progressive strategies as well.

We also have long time interest in MV in expanding Mistral's language program to the middle schools. There should be an option for families to continue building full Spanish fluency in the middle school, bolstered by a new track to allow 6th graders with home spoken Spanish to crash-course via a summer program to join Mistral students, to add to their ranks.

If there is enough demand, we should explore Mandarin as well. We should resume supporting homeschooling as part of the MVWSD community. We should stop seeing every child as needing the same.

 

Fencing

I was skeptical at first (given the dramatic impact these projects will have), yet hearing from staff and parents, I believe the outcome of fences to be the right conclusion, and yet each campus should have a design that fits their community.

A neighborhood bereft of open space, the fence could be limited to the building and asphalt perimeter, though these details shouldn't be for the board or district alone to decide, but for the community, the board's role is to ensure that process happens (and happens in right order: community input before contract approval).

Key is not to seek uniformity but to co-design with each neighborhood. School systems fail when we do not see each child as unique, and we fail facility planning if we treat each of our different campuses the same, blind of any underlining differences and deficits in local open space.

What makes creative engagement hard is a false sense of urgency. The current school board approved the fencing and awarded the contract before public feedback. They are now seeking feedback. The order is subtle but matters. One feels rushed the moment a firm is hired, and work with them is billable, and second, if the board has already approved it, the public has lost the last checkpoint with their elected representatives.

It's true this is district land, yet it doesn't belong to the superintendent or school board. It belongs to the public, so there is absolutely enough time to treat this as a community resource rather than the private property of the schools. The school district should take as much time as needed to co-design these with each neighborhood, which means, there is no need to build them at 11 schools all at once. The timeline of COVID and construction cost pressure to proceed all at once are false and unhelpful restraints.

Treat the community member as equals, and an innovative solution of how to fence in a way that is both safe and workable for the neighborhoods will organically develop for every site, yet this takes time, let's give it time.

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