What is your connection to the Tosa community?

I’ve been a resident for eight to nine years. I’ve been active and engaged in various community capacities. Most recently, I was appointed to the school board in August of 2024. So of all of the candidates, I’m the only one that’s actually sitting on the school board currently, and have been for about six months now. I’m also a parent of a neurodiverse child, and I supported the Yes to Tosa Kids campaign and both referendums. I believe in continuing to grow our schools and making sure that the community invests in them, because typically the overall happiness in a neighborhood tends to be tied to the quality of the schools.

Why are you running for the school board?

I’m continuing to run because I’d like to make sure that I can see the things that I’ve been involved in and started to work on come through, at least to the end of this term. I say this because I took over mid-term, which means is that that I serve from when my appointment was until the next election, which is obviously coming up in a couple weeks here. I’m running because I want to see that the referendum budgets are spent according to what we had promised the community as a district. Also the things that were voted on like trying to figure out what the community would like to do as far as the secondary schools. Especially now that we voted on moving towards a K through six elementary model, just continuing to oversee that processes and the things that I’ve been involved in is important to me. I feel like I’ve done a really good job so far, and I’d like to keep going and see how those things can play out.

What do you think the school board or district has done well recently?

So I’ll talk about this from my perspective of a school board member going forward, because I’ve got two different opinions. There’s before school board involvement in which I was coming at it as a community member and a parent and wasn’t necessarily as well informed on all the issues. Then there’s the perspective of then becoming a school board member, where you very quickly get really deep into a lot of the things that are going on, and the things that the average citizen may have no idea of what’s being done. Several of these things have taken years, and I was just kind of coming in on the tail end of it. However, I would pick a few things that I thought were that were done well.  I think rolling out the additional AP course offerings into high schools was a really good initiative… The African American Studies, the dual credit business foundations, the urban farming and the coding and gaming design… those things show that the list of what AP courses are available usually comes down to the fact that there’s a much bigger list than what actually ends up being offered.  It all depends on student interest. So the whole concept of some of these things were to try to get things a little more up to date and in alignment with the interests of your generation.

What would your number one priority be if you are on the school board?

This kind of goes hand in hand with other things I think the board has done well recently, and that’s improving transparency after all the budgeting things came out. Subsequently, that was all that stuff I had no idea about before going into this position, and it came out the day after I was appointed.  So I think, I think since then, we’ve done a good job of being more transparent, and that’s going to be one of my primary goals. I serve on the Finance and Resource Committee right now… Assuming I stay on that committee, I would want to continue to oversee what’s going on with the referendum dollars.  I know it’s important to everybody, but it’s extremely important to people that are on a fixed income and how it affects their their taxes. Also, the people who maybe have different income levels. For some people, a few hundred dollars doesn’t seem like a lot. For others, the additional tax burden can mean the difference between groceries for that week. So we really want to pay attention to that and get make sure that we can get on a on a path that we eventually can make the district become more sustainable, and that we don’t need to keep going to more referendums.

What unique professional or personal perspective will you bring to the board?

I bring an outside perspective. I’ve not been an educator like many other board members and candidates. I’ve got 25 years of Software Development and Engineering as my background. I specialize in process improvement and I’ve led several teams. I’ve I’ve seen large scale projects from start to finish.  This helps use the facts available and the things that are given at hand to try to make the best decisions possible.

What’s one thing in the last year that you’ve accomplished that you are proud of?

Two things… Obviously the the board appointment has been a huge focus. There’s a lot of people that I have talked to who seem to think that this is a paid position. It is not. It is a 100% volunteer, and it is fairly time consuming. I would say a good eight to 10 hours per week are spent on board business and trying to be as active and engaged as possible. So that’s been a really big part of my life since last August. Prior to that, my biggest and proudest accomplishment of the year was being able to rehab myself from open heart surgery that I had had just a little over a year ago. So that was quite a life changing experience as well… Getting myself back up to speed and being able to get back to life as normal after such a traumatic event. I’m super proud of that.

How will you ensure that students perspectives are heard on the school board?

I think the best thing that we can do is kind of what we’re doing right now. When I was appointed, there weren’t currently any student representatives on on the board. Shortly after, we had quite a few student applicants, and we now have representatives from each high school. Whether who shows up is kind of scheduled dependent, because some of these board meetings are pretty short notice, and they can get rather long. However, we’ve had really good engagement with the students, and gotten a really good perspective from the high school student side of things.  So I think giving both, high schools equal representation in it really is the best way for the board and the governing bodies to really understand and engage students.

What is one fun fact about yourself?

I would call myself a pretty active video game enthusiast, and I’m still pretty decent at it for my age. I don’t get a lot of time to play anymore, so my skills are dwindling a little bit. But if I get an hour or two free each week, that’s where I’ll go to unwind and usually play the hardest games I can find. My favorite games are Elden Ring, Bloodborne or most of the Dark Souls series games.