Originally posted on the San Francisco Examiner.
With four seats open and only one incumbent running in the November election, more than half of the seven-member San Francisco Board of Education could turn over next year. Eleven candidates are campaigning to lead the school district toward equilibrium as it faces numerous challenges in coming years.
Terms expire this year for Board President Matt Alexander and fellow board members Jenny Lam, Mark Sanchez and Kevine Boggess. All but Alexander chose not to run again as the district contends with forthcoming school closures, a state-imposed hiring freeze, continually declining enrollment and, now, oversight from the mayor’s office.
The Examiner reached out to the candidates with five questions that aim to give voters a glimpse of their qualifications and priorities. Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Min Chang
What is your top concern regarding the state of the school district, and how would you address it if elected? Bring solutions that address the near-term fiscal crisis and longer-term growth. Closing schools is not the answer; it will only make things worse and drive more families away from public schools. It will also make the existing schools more crowded and class sizes even larger. We need to reduce the administration’s costs and manage the district’s assets more effectively. We will need to invest in the longer-term growth of enrollment, investing in schools, upgrading our curriculum, raising performance of educators and working with our communities to implement change.
Balancing the budget, managing multi-billion-dollar budgets and organizations of thousands is not foreign to me. There is more than $1.2 billion in the budget, and yet it does not trickle down to schools. While enrollment has declined sharply, administration costs and budgets have increased.
Bring back educators that are good and want to teach; pay them fairly and expect excellence.
Really engage with parents and community in school improvements; they know the solutions and can help with implementation.
What qualities or experiences set you apart from other candidates? Experience matters on the school board, and I bring 35 years of experience in solving problems collaboratively and getting things done. This is what I do every day as CEO of a San Francisco health-care company with more than 500 employees. Managing $1 billion budgets is not foreign to me. I have worked for Fortune 100 companies on six continents, headed up regions and businesses, and collaborated with all types of groups to achieve financial and operational results. Having been CEO multiple times gives me the unique ability to turn businesses around, which is what is needed given the fiscal crisis at SFUSD.
I believe strongly in education as a mother and product of public schools myself. I hold two bachelor’s degrees from Penn, two master’s degrees from MIT and Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins. The board needs the experience I bring to grow our schools, not close them, and bring families back to public schools, as well as to push for a stronger curriculum by bringing back core subjects.
How can SFUSD increase enrollment while also ensuring resources are spread evenly across school communities? Increasing enrollment will only happen when our public schools are as good as — if not better than — the competition: the other options that parents have to send their kids. Therefore, it is imperative that we build our curriculum, improve our schools, invest in our educators, maintain our facilities and keep our school district solvent.
Do you support the passage of Proposition A, SFUSD’s $790 million school facilities bond? Why or why not? I support using and leveraging the remaining funds from the 2011 and 2016 bonds first before asking for additional funding. I also support ensuring that the funding is effectively used and is outcome/result-based.
If elected, how would you make yourself available to school communities — including parents, students, educators and SFUSD staff — beyond Board of Education meetings? I have been visiting schools and speaking with parents, principals, teachers, and students and spending a great deal of time in the 39 communities where our 120 schools sit. As a board member, I will commit to continuing to do this grassroots engagement so that our “customers” – the families and schools – are really heard and really involved in solutioning with SFUSD.
Clearly laying out our annual business plan and our multiyear strategic plan is also important and ensuring that we involve the community in the planning, design and implementation phases is critical to success.