Tam Union High School District board hopefuls talk equity, achievement and fiscal transparency

Four of the five candidates vying for two seats on the Tamalpais Union High School District board shared their perspectives on closing the achievement gap, school safety, financial accountability and other key issues facing the district at a Sept. 16 virtual forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Marin.

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Ray Chaudhuri, Jennifer Holden, Amos Klausner, Nicholas Ondrejka and Ida Times-Green will compete for the seats on the Nov. 5 ballot after incumbents Leslie Harlander and Karen Loebbaka declined to seek re-election. Harlander was first elected to the board in 2015, while Loebbaka was appointed to an interim seat in 2019.

Ondrejka, however, was not able to attend the candidate forum.

Chaudhuri, 53, is a Mill Valley resident who has lived in Marin for about a decade. He works as a health-care executive with a focus on investments and operations in the U.S. and globally and noted he has also worked with the National Institutes of Health to create academic partnerships with universities across the world. He has a daughter who is a freshman at Tamalpais High School, and another child who attends the University of California at Santa Cruz.

He said he hopes to bring his leadership experience to the role of board member, with a focus on students.

“I know what students face when they finish high school, and the choices they have to make,” he said, adding that his interest in running for the board is to give back to the community. “I believe I can bring my national and global experience to help (students) deal with the competitive academic environment but also important local issues that students and administrators face.”

He said among the district board’s priorities for the next four years should be helping students deal with increased levels of stress and anxiety.

Holden, 45, is a San Anselmo resident and founder of a natural, handcrafted skincare line, Oleema Skincare. She has three children, two of whom attend Archie Williams High School and one who recently graduated from there. She noted she’s been an active volunteer in local schools for some 13 years, including serving on the Tam district’s racial equity task force and with the Falcon Foundation, which raises money to support academic and enrichment programs at Archie Williams.

She said her volunteer roles within the district have helped her learn more about the needs of students, teachers and the larger community.

“I’m running for the school board for the same reason I volunteered: to be of service to the community that I love and to make the schools the best they can be,” she said, adding that her priorities if elected would be improving academic performance, rebuilding trust with the community by fostering increased transparency and communication and addressing schools’ needs in a fiscally responsible way.

Klausner is a San Geronimo resident who has lived in Marin for more than 25 years. The 52-year-old is an art director at audit and advisory firm PwC. His daughter attends Archie Williams, and his wife teaches at Strawberry Point Elementary School.

He’s currently an elected member of the Marin County Committee on School District Organization, which oversees requests for school-district territory transfers, and previously served four years on the board of trustees for the Lagunitas School District, where he was also on the district site council and the district’s bond oversight committee and still serves on the district’s facilities committee.

He also volunteers as the coach of the Archie Williams mountain bike team.

Klausner said he is running for the Tam district board “because it needs tested leadership” that he feels he can provide. If elected, he said, he will focus on district spending and academic achievement.

The district is facing a lot of issues, he said, “and it all boils down to what we can afford to address, and that means paying a keen eye and attention on the budget.”

Times-Green, meanwhile, is a 63-year-old Marin City resident and a fourth-generation Tamalpais High School graduate who has a master’s in social work and currently serves as a senior program coordinator with the county Department of Health and Human Services.

She spent eight years on the board of the Sausalito-Marin City School District, noting she has a “proven track record of building consensus to achieve collaborative outcomes.”

“I’m a strong believer in the transformative power of public service, and I see it as my calling,” she said.

She said one of the board’s priorities over the next four years should be improving climate, culture and belonging at all school sites, including working with feeder schools to prepare students for high school when the time comes.

Ondrejka, 53, owns PuroClean, a property-restoration business based in San Rafael, and has a background in corporate technology management. He lives in Corte Madera and has three children, one who currently attends Redwood High School and two who previously graduated from the school.

Candidates say achievement gap, diversity efforts need work

Among the topics discussed at the forum were how the board can work to help close the district’s achievement gap, which consistently shows Black and Hispanic students lagging behind their white and Asians peers.

State standardized test results from the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data available, show that some 81% of white students and about 80% of Asian students in the district met or exceeded standards in English, compared to just 59% of Hispanic students and 42% of Black students. Meanwhile, some 67% of Asian students and 62% of white students in the district met or exceeded math standards, compared to just 33% of Black and Hispanic students.

Chaudhuri noted it was important to bring kids into science, technology, math and engineering programs by middle school to help close those gaps and create educational parity.

Klausner said the question comes up a lot, and his answer is always the same: “early intervention, early intervention, early intervention.” He said the district’s current strategy of hiring “$450-per-hour consultants” to try to address the problem when kids are already in high school may help “but is certainly not going to be a panacea.”

He said the district needs to start working with the feeder schools earlier to help kids understand what the expectations are in high school.

“My goal would be for every kid in this county coming into high school to qualify for geometry,” he said. “That would be exceptional and really show we are able to tackle the achievement gap.”

Times-Green agreed that the district needs to strengthen its communication and involvement with its feeder schools.

“The big word for me is ‘expectations,’” she said. “Children can learn. Start with them early, continue with them. Give them the ability to show you that they can learn, and then work with them where they are.”

She noted the use of consultants can be helpful in the district, including one guiding the district’s racial equity task force, on which Times-Green serves. The task force was created to audit the district’s courses to include anti-racist content, develop policies to amplify the district’s anti-discrimination policy and select training resources that support the implementation of anti-racist policies.

She said the consultant is “bringing to the forefront reasons why our kids, specifically our BIPOC students, are not achieving. Those are types of things our administrator, our educators need to know.”

Holden also agreed that the achievement gap needs to be addressed earlier. However, at the high-school level, she said, the district needs to “prioritize spending on specialists who can help with academics in the classroom,” such as reading, math or resource specialists to help teachers, and provide additional tutoring and mentoring resources to students.

The candidates all generally agreed the district needs to do more to address issues of diversity, equity and inclusion and that current anti-racist programs aren’t doing enough to address incidents of hate within the district.

Times-Green called the issue a “perpetual” one for the district, noting that when she was a student back in the 1970s, the same discussions were happening. However, she said, she does feel like everyone in the district, including the school board and the administration, is committed to “doing the work,” including listening and putting plans together to respond to any incidents that arise.

Holden, however, said she doesn’t think the district’s efforts are going far enough, in part because the district isn’t going directly to teachers and asking them what is resonating with students.

“Teachers are quite literally the boots on the ground,” she said. “They see what resonates with the kids and what does not. I would advocate for much stronger communication with teachers to hear what is resonating with students, what is working, what do students roll their eyes at.”

She noted inclusive curriculum is also important, as schools need “diverse material, diverse voices in the classroom through books, poetry, essays.”

“All of those things help the students actually walk in someone else’s shoes,” she said.

Chaudhuri said he lived in the deep South for more than a decade and has seen some anti-racism programs that do work. He said those involve “educating not only the students over and over again as well as the community.”

“I think it needs to be an inclusive process between reaching out to the school community and having the teachers be involved in doing that,” he said.

Klausner noted the issue hits close to home for him, as his family has been focused on fighting antisemitism; his father, Rabbi Abraham Klausner, was a Jewish chaplain in the U.S. Army who arrived at the Dachau concentration camp a few days after its liberation in 1945 to aid Holocaust survivors.

He said the battle against racism and hate is getting “harder to fight” with social media, TV and politics.

“We need to do more,” he said. “I must admit that I don’t have all the answers there. No one does because we still have a ways to go, but I certainly would like to work on it.”

Candidates advocate for safety, focus on mental health

Candidates were also asked how the board could better support school safety in the wake of recent threats to campuses both locally and nationally.

The Tam district faced separate bomb and shooting threats Sept. 13, with the former shutting down all campuses for much of the day and the latter leading to the arrest of a 15-year-old San Anselmo girl.

The bomb threat came to the district via text, and students were immediately instructed to stay home or go home if on campus or on the way to school. The Central Marin Police Authority and the Mill Valley Police Department swept through the district’s campuses and found no threats. No arrests have been made regarding the bomb threat, but the investigation is still ongoing.

While police were investigating the incident, the San Anselmo girl allegedly made a shooting threat over Snapchat. The girl, who is not being named because she’s a minor, was arrested by Central Marin police with assistance from the FBI.

Those threats came on the heels of a Sept. 4 school shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which a student is accused of killing four people and injuring nine more.

Klausner noted all the district’s campuses have emergency plans that should be practiced with students, something he said “probably doesn’t happen enough.”

In addition, he said, “we need to be able to teach our kids how to identify fellow students who are having challenges and give them a safe reporting system to allow them to tell a parent, a teacher and administration that there’s an issue.”

Times-Green agreed that schools should be practicing their emergency plans and also said campuses needed to establish close ties with local law enforcement. In addition, she said, kids need to follow the rule of “see something, say something.”

She also said if there aren’t school safety committees on each campus, those should be formed immediately, and the board should support that work.

Holden agreed that each campus needs to practice its emergency-preparedness plans and that the district should work with local law enforcement. She also noted the district has “very wonderful, well-funded wellness centers, and we need to utilize those resources as well.”

Chaudhuri, meanwhile, said the district is failing in its efforts to prepare students.

“I think there needs to be a higher level of training given to both teachers, administration and students,” he said, adding that the district should look into some of the technology coming out of Silicon Valley that he noted isn’t very expensive but can help increase school safety.

All the candidates said the district needed to better support students’ collective mental health, with Chaudhuri noting that “mental stressors have increased and will continue to increase as students get flooded with social media and not only have to deal with academics.”

He said there are national mental-health and wellness programs that the district can bring in “at very, very low cost.”

“I think it’s very, very much needed for our students, I’m very concerned about this,” he said.

Klausner noted that mental-health directly ties into issues of school safety. It’s key to increase parental involvement, he said, and ensure parents understand the types of issues students are facing and know how to talk to their kids about them.

“We have to be able to have these open communications so that we can address issues when they arise,” he said.

Times-Green said the district has already done students a great service by incorporating wellness centers on campuses, noting she completed a social-work internship in the center at Tamalpais High School and that the center “was a safe space for kids to have conversations with someone who would listen.”

Holden said student mental health is “a real problem,” agreeing with Times-Green that the district’s wellness centers “are wonderful and well-funded, and they should continue to always be well-funded.”

She also said she agreed with Klausner that the district needed to focus on parent involvement, including better communicating parent education nights, which she said are usually not very well attended.

“We need to make sure that information gets out to as many people as possible,” she said, adding that if the issue “is left to the schools alone and the district alone, it won’t work.”

Fiscal transparency key amid district’s bond measure push

In addition to selecting two new board members, district voters in the upcoming election will be asked to consider Measure B, a $289-million facilities bond measure.

The measure is a scaled-back version of the $517-million facilities bond, Measure A, that narrowly failed at the polls in March, garnering 54% support where 55% was needed to pass. The district settled on the $289 million as a compromise of sorts, allowing it to secure funding for what they’ve identified as the highest priority projects for student safety while also taking into account feedback from many district voters who said the price tag of the $517-million measure was just too high.

All four candidates at the forum said they supported Measure B and said it was critical for the district to ensure financial accountability and be transparent with the community.

Holden said Measure B was “much better” than Measure A because it was responsive to community concerns.

“They created a bond that’s much leaner, that addresses the immediate needs of the district, and as a result I’m hopeful that it will pass,” she said.

Chaudhuri said accountability and transparency “go hand in hand,” adding that “the community needs to know what they’re going to be supporting the district on.” He noted if the bond measure passes, the district should talk about “what is working, what is not working and how they can do future measures much better.”

He said people “need to feel that they’re part of what they paid for and what they’re getting in return.”

Klausner has noted he opposed Measure A but supports Measure B. However, he said, he is dedicated to rigorous oversight of spending should the bond measure pass. He also said the district generally needs to be more transparent with the public about its spending. Each board meeting, he notes, members are asked to approve warrants, or the district’s invoices and bills, and those often seem like they’re “written in a foreign language.”

“We need to do a much better job of paying attention to those warrants and explaining to our community what those warrants are,” he said.

Times-Green called fiscal accountability and transparency “crucial.” She noted the importance of Measure B passing to avoid “critical cuts,” as district official have warned that the urgency of some of the work — particularly districtwide heating, ventilation and cooling upgrades and roof repairs, which need to be done in the next two to five years — means that if a bond measure doesn’t pass in November, the district will likely have to cut programs to pay for the projects.

“When you talk about transparency, I agree, we need to be in front of the community letting them know exactly what it is with the dollars that have been afforded to the district,” she said.

Some candidates noted fiscal transparency and oversight are especially important as enrollment in the district continues to decline. After a sustained period of increased enrollment between roughly 2010 and 2020, the district is now projecting a steady decrease. In the current school year, the district was projecting some 4,491 students across its five campuses, according to the fiscal 2025 budget. That’s projected to drop to 4,297 students next year, 4,130 in 2026-2027, 3,982 in 2027-2028 and 3,855 in 2028-2029.

Both Klausner and Holden pointed out declining enrollment doesn’t have a drastic financial impact because the Tam district is a basic-aid district, meaning it is primarily funded through property and parcel taxes rather than on a per-pupil basis by state and federal funds.

“The fewer students we have, the more money we can spend per pupil,” Klausner said. He noted the real issue with declining enrollment is whether the district can “still sustain a vibrant educational community with fewer students,” which he believes it can.

Holden noted that “as enrollment declines, we’re going to have to continue to look at staffing and make sure we’re meeting our staffing needs,” adding that it’s important but sometimes difficult for basic-aid districts to forecast budgets in advance.

Chaudhuri said the district needs to ensure parity for students across all campuses and determine a long-term budget strategy.

“We need to prepare for bigger budget cuts in the future, and bring in resources that don’t cost us,” he said.

Times-Green said declining enrollment could paint a picture for the greater community that maybe the district is not putting out the best product.

“That’s not a picture that I would like to promote in any way,” she said, adding that the district has “exceptional and incredible schools.”

She noted the district has to ensure it’s maintaining a balanced budget, but, at the same time, “we want students to come in and not exit out.”

“I support programs that are going to draw and not detract,” she said.

Reach Assistant Editor Emily Lavin at 415-944-3841. Support local journalism and SUBSCRIBE NOW for home delivery and access to the digital replica.

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