About

My Story...

As 16-year residents of Mountain View, my wife and I have had kids in the Mountain View elementary and middle schools for the last 9 years (and still counting). I served as the School Site Council Chair at Monta Loma Elementary (2015-2017), focusing on addressing our achievement gap, improving academic performance, and implementing anti-bullying plans. I served on District-wide facilities committees implementing Measure G improvements: the Board Facilities Committee (2013-2014) and District Facilities Committee (2015), taking a balanced view of priorities, driving recommendations within budget constraints, finding areas of consensus, and ensuring a minimum facilities standard was met across all schools. With extensive work experience in strategy, operations, and project management, I will drive strong execution and fiscal discipline to see us through the impacts of COVID-19 and still reward our teachers for the great work they do. I am passionate about laying the foundations for academic excellence in the early years of kids’ education, creating an inclusive culture, and ensuring MVWSD graduates are ready for both scholastic and socio-emotional success in high school.

DISTRICT PARENT

It's important for the MVWSD Board to be familiar with how our schools run for students and parents, at both the elementary and middle school levels, and have networks with current parents, teachers, and principals in order to stay connected. As an involved elementary school parent at Monta Loma Elementary, I thought it was important to wait to run for school board until our family had exposure to our middle schools, and after three years at Crittenden Middle School we feel much more connected to 6th-8th grade life in our District. While not every board member needs to have relatively current MVWSD elementary and middle school experience, I think it's critical for there to be at least one who does. Each of our middle schools touch approximately half of all students that come through our district - we've been at Crittenden for the last three years, and will still be there for the next three.

While we've lived in different parts of Mountain View over the course of our 16 years here, including stints in the Sylvan Park and Monta Loma neighborhoods, we've owned a home north of El Camino in the Rock Street neighborhood around Crittenden for many years, and plan to be here for a very long time. We've gotten to know so many people in the community through the schools and through extracurricular activities like soccer. We chose Mountain View for its diversity, and continue to see the benefits of sending our kids to school with children from different backgrounds and lifestyles - whether it's getting exposed to something new, or having an opportunity to help others.

They're much bigger now...

A LIFE CONNECTED TO SCHOOLS

Growing up in Massachusetts in one of the top public school districts in the state, our family sought out opportunities to do more for our schools, and I learned at a very young age what it meant to do special events, be an activist in the community, teach, and help run a school district. Whether it was creating and teaching a 3rd grade computer programming class as a 5th grader, running off hundreds of flyers to protest proposed cuts to our music programs, creating new school policy as part of our high school student council, improving school pride as a leader of our marching band, building out a new school store for my Eagle Scout project, or interning for our superintendent, I sought out ways to be more involved and do more.

After graduating high school as the class valedictorian, I moved to California to attend Stanford University, earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a M.S. in Materials Science & Engineering. Along the way, I took jobs as a teaching assistant for undergraduate engineering classes and research assistant in the experimental physics lab. I found ways to give back to the school through leadership roles for spirit events and musicals. Following graduation I served as a fundraising lead and chair of an alumni advisory board, where I was closely involved in the search and hiring of a full-time Band Director.

Fast-forwarding to life as a Mountain View parent, I engaged in the debate over Measure G facilities priorities and successfully pushed for the prioritization of the auditorium construction at Graham and Crittenden. I pushed back on community-impacting concepts like two-story school buildings in the Monta Loma neighborhood, helped build consensus for moving forward on elementary school improvements that brought our schools to a more consistent standard, and presented the final recommendations of the District Facilities Committee to the Board. With two years leading the Monta Loma School Site Council and leadership roles on eight annual Walk-a-Thons under my belt, I've enjoyed giving back to our neighborhood school - and take great pride in being married to a former PTA president, historian, vice president, and parliamentarian who has has left her own mark at Monta Loma.

Running for the MVWSD School Board is a great opportunity to pull all this experience together and apply it to help our local schools get better - and I'm excited to see what we can do together!

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE THAT CAN HELP OUR SCHOOLS

I have 22 years of experience working in Silicon Valley in a variety of fields including business operations, product development, manufacturing equipment development, sales & marketing, and strategy. This has included experience in contract negotiation, management of large capital and direct spending budgets, project management, communications, effective meetings, diversity & inclusion programs, leader recruiting, and performance management - experience that can complement the other skills we have on the MVWSD board and help our district operate better. Having managed teams and guided large organizations during good times and challenging times, I've learned how to apply the right tools for the situation and how to make the tough calls.

As a technology innovator with multiple patents and other contributions which have advanced the state of technology in our world, I'm excited to help keep innovation alive within our district. We can look for new ways to use technology to make our schools better; having personally worked on developing education technology hardware for classrooms in bandwidth-constrained regions, I have direct experience with understanding school technology needs and limitations. Having someone with a broad-based technology background on the board can help provide the right level of sponsorship and oversight as creativity, entrepreneurship, and the state of technology continue to evolve in Silicon Valley.

MUSICIAN WITH A PASSION FOR SUPPORTING THE ARTS

I started playing alto saxophone in the 5th grade, and helped grow a resurgent public school music program, including teaching music lessons to other students, serving as drum major for my high school band, and having a front-row seat to what it takes to rebuild and grow music in schools. Music is now my very enjoyable 37-years-and-counting hobby and service opportunity. This has included competitive marching, jazz, and concert band, college band, arranging and composing music for the field, the arena, the stage, and clubs. I currently play trumpet in a local soul/funk band (we are on hiatus right now due to COVID-19), and am helping raise a violin player. Along the way, I've gained an appreciation for what it takes to strengthen and grow performing arts programs, and the importance of elementary and middle school programs in starting people down a path that includes music and the arts.