Reed Union School District: Parent, leadership coach set to step onto board

The newest member of the Reed Union School District board is a parent who says he’s eager to use his more than two decades of experience as a business executive and leadership coach to help move the district forward.

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Sandeep Sahai is set to join the five-member board in December after running uncontested alongside incumbent Liz Webb in the Nov. 5 election for two four-year seats. He’ll replace Jacqueline Jaffee, who has served since 2020 but chose not to run for a second term.

“I’m a strong believer in community and learning and connecting with people,” Sahai said. “It takes a village, and we want our kids to be surrounded by this village of people who support them, who give them space, who help them grow.”

Sahai, 56, moved to Tiburon from San Francisco in 2020 with his wife, Michele, and daughters Sophie, 15 and a sophomore at Redwood High School, and 3½-year-old Chloe, who will enroll in pre-K in the Reed district next year.

He’s originally from New Delhi, India, where he earned a degree in commerce from the University of Delhi. He moved to the U.S. in 1997 to attend Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where he earned his master’s in business administration and management in 1999. He relocated to San Francisco that same year.

Sahai has held executive roles with a variety of companies, including serving as director and head of international outlets for Gap; director of merchandising for The Body Shop; and vice president and head of retail gourmet chocolate for Mars Inc.

In 2008, he started Bay Teachers, providing recruitment and staffing consulting to private, parochial and charter schools. He said that was his initial exposure to the world of education, as it “got me into classrooms, got me into schools, got me connected to heads of schools, to educators (and) to other staff who work at schools who are not educators,” adding that he got to see schools “from very different sides.”

He started winding that business down in 2014, after his first wife died and he decided he needed to scale back to focus on raising Sophie as a single dad. He transitioned to consulting, noting he wanted to draw on his own executive experience to “help other leaders be better leaders.”

Currently, he’s the founder and CEO of Pebble and Ripple, providing confidential leadership coaching to C-suite executives and those looking to move into leadership roles.

“It allows me to meet and talk to really smart people and sometimes support them through their ups and downs and help them have a bigger impact,” he said.

Though his days frequently involve back-to-back Zoom calls, he said he finds the work incredibly rewarding.

“I can always look you in the eye and say I end up having more energy at the end of the day than when I start,” he said.

He first got involved in the Reed district soon after moving to town, when Sophie was a student at Del Mar Middle School. Describing himself as “a strong believer in leaning in rather than leaning out,” he volunteered to serve on the district’s strategic planning committee, which helped develop the six-year document that outlines the district’s vision, goals and the actions it plans to take to achieve those goals. He also served on the search committee for a new Del Mar principal in 2022.

Sahai said he was interested in joining the district board simply because he feels he can help make a difference, noting he’s a curious person whose career experience lends itself to the work of a board member, which in part entails supporting others in their roles.

“It helps that I run a business, it helps that I understand management, it helps that I understand finance,” he said.

He noted the Reed district has checked several of the boxes of a stand-out school district, including attracting and retaining high-quality teachers and achieving high academic standards, noting the district is “doing a lot of things incredibly well.”

“I feel I can bring my experience and what I do every day to say, ‘All right, where do we go from here?’” Sahai said.

He said one area he’d like to see the board focus on is continuing to forge more connections between the school district and the larger community.

“We want everybody in the community to be involved because that makes for better schools,” he said. “It’s about the question, ‘Are we doing the best we can to engage all stakeholders?’”

He said he also thinks the district is positioned to really examine what a top-notch school district looks like post-COVID, including, for instance, how to best balance the use of technology so that it’s truly serving the district’s goals for student achievement.

However, Sahai noted, he knows he’ll have a lot to learn as he joins the board, and said he’ll work to understand where the district is at and the perspectives of different stakeholders.

“I don’t know what I don’t know, and I want to learn and find out what I don’t know,” he said. “Once I feel I have a point of view that is well thought out, I have no fear of sharing my point of view. I’m very comfortable being vocal.”

Sahai said he wasn’t expecting the race for the seat to be uncontested, and when he threw his hat in the ring, he figured if the election was contested, he would at least take part in a process that would facilitate conversation and allow for different viewpoints to be expressed.

Now that he’s won the seat outright, he noted he doesn’t have any higher political ambitions and reiterated he’s looking forward to working with his colleagues on the board to make a difference.

“I’m really excited about continuing to learn and hopefully make an impact,” he said.

Reach Assistant Editor Emily Lavin, The Ark’s education and youth reporter, at 415-944-3841. DONATE to support local journalism, or SUBSCRIBE NOW for home delivery and access to the digital replica.

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