For a long time, our district did an excellent job with one kind of student — the university-bound student headed for a four-year school, with strong IB and AP programs to match. That’s worth protecting. But when my own oldest kids were in high school, I barely knew what dual enrollment or career technical education even were, because there wasn’t much of it. I set out to change that — to widen the definition of excellence so it serves every student, not just the ones on the Ivy League track.

So we grew dual enrollment from a handful of courses into offerings on every campus — real, transferable community-college units taught right at the high school by teachers with master’s degrees, under a shared agreement with Sierra College. Some of our students now walk across the graduation stage having already earned an associate degree. I’ve watched it happen, and I’ll admit I was a little envious my own kids never had the chance.

We built career technical education up to the same level, designed hand-in-hand with Sierra College and regional employers so the programs actually connect to careers: the Health Academy at Oakmont with hospital and medical-office internships, a mechatronics pathway aligned to Sierra College and the region’s advanced-manufacturing employers like Bosch, construction technology sponsored by the local trades, and environmental resources built with the City of Roseville. Educators from across the state have asked how to replicate what we’ve built. We also brought two campuses together as Roseville Pathways — including a Middle College partnership with Sierra College — so students who learn differently graduate with real opportunity and none of the old stigma.

None of this works without great teachers, so I treat that as part of the same priority. Because our district stays fiscally healthy while many around us struggle, we can pay at the top of our peer districts, honor the full years of service of the experienced teachers we recruit, and share unexpected state dollars back with our staff — as we did this year, adding a raise and a $2,000 stipend when the state budget came in stronger than expected, rather than pocket the difference. The results show: our principals and administrators have been honored as regional leaders of the year, Antelope earned recognition as a 2026 California Distinguished School, and teachers move toward this district, not away from it. The adult standing in front of a student is the single biggest in-school factor in that student’s success, and we work hard to attract and keep the best.

Before I ever sat on a school board, I spent 14 years in law enforcement — patrol, street crimes, robbery investigations — and, early on as a reserve officer, a school year as a campus officer. That experience shapes how I think about keeping students safe: not just toughness, but sound policy that protects kids and respects their rights.

When I first ran, I promised a full safety evaluation of every one of our campuses. We did exactly that — rebuilding each school’s safety plan, individualized to the site, board-approved, and reviewed every year. From there we built something more comprehensive.

Our staff were already doing strong behavioral threat assessment work — the preventive, team-based practice of identifying and helping a student in crisis before anyone gets hurt — when I joined the board. My contribution was to insist we not leave it as an informal program, but write it into formal board policy so it was documented, permanent, and board-accountable. I then proposed we take our model to the California School Boards Association to present as an example for other districts to adopt — which we did, ahead of the state later mandating this kind of policy. I also did the hands-on work: I was the only school-board member from any district at a regional threat-assessment training led by Roseville PD and the FBI, and I’ve hosted regional law-enforcement meetings on the subject in my university role.

When Roseville PD offered to connect our campus cameras to its Real Time Crime Center — so that in a critical incident, officers can see the ground truth instead of going in blind, as we saw go so wrong at Uvalde — I supported the safety value but had a concern about student privacy. So I asked the board to hold the item while we worked out a formal agreement with strict protections: an audit trail every time the cameras are accessed, no facial recognition of students unless a student is the threat, and activation only during genuine critical incidents. I personally consulted with an FBI agent for an outside review. When a hoax threat targeted one of our campuses this spring, that kind of partnership let law enforcement respond and clear it quickly. Real protection and real privacy, by design.

And when one of our campuses had only ad-hoc, rotating deputy coverage — sometimes none at all — I worked directly with county leadership, including a one-on-one meeting and a campus visit, to negotiate fair, dedicated staffing. An officer who knows the students and the campus isn’t just there to enforce; they’re there to build the kind of relationship that makes law enforcement a resource students trust.

I ran to protect a district that was excelling in the classroom — and discovered that while the teaching was strong, the way we governed ourselves needed real repair. Policies were out of date, some meetings weren’t being run the way open-government laws require, and the board’s relationship with its one employee, the superintendent, had drifted. Good governance isn’t glamorous, but it’s the structure everything else rests on, so I went to work on it.

We reset the line between the board’s job and the superintendent’s — the board sets the destination and holds the administration accountable for results; the superintendent runs the operation. To make that durable, we adopted a clear set of Board Expectations, read aloud at the start of every meeting so every trustee and every member of the public is level-set on what we’re here to do. We invested in real governance and leadership training for the whole board and cabinet, and when it came time to hire a new superintendent, we ran an open, board-driven search rather than letting a firm recirculate the same rotating candidates.

We also audited every policy the district had on the books — hundreds of them — through the board’s Policy Committee, which I’ve served on since my first day and chaired all six years. And we strengthened the rule that governs how policy itself gets made: for any significant new policy, the board now discusses it in public and invites community input first, and does not vote the same day. People deserve to help inform a decision before it’s made, not be informed of one already baked.

Two more reforms voters can feel. We moved labor contracts to be settled before the fiscal year begins, instead of the old pattern where teachers started the school year not knowing their pay and waited on retroactive checks. And when we settle early and the state later sends more than expected — as happened this year — we honor our word and share it: we reopened just the pay portion of our settled contracts and added a raise and a one-time stipend for staff. That’s better for teachers, it’s more honest budgeting, and it’s built real trust. Finally, I’ve been able to bring what we built here to other agencies — I’ve been asked to train city councils and school boards around the region, and even presented internationally, on how good governance turns a board and its administration into real partners.

I learned fiscal discipline the hard way — helping lead one of the nation’s ten largest cities through the depths of the Great Recession. The point of all of it is simple: keep tax dollars in the classroom, and never let a downturn cost our students their teachers or their programs.

The fundamentals first. We’ve balanced the budget every single year. We hold reserves at over double the state’s minimum requirement — a genuine cushion, managed right up to the level the state allows, so we can absorb a bad year or an unplanned event without cutting into kids. And we refinanced bonds to save taxpayers over $13 million, retiring that debt sooner and leaving more in residents’ pockets in the years ahead.

The move I’m proudest of is one most people never hear about: a dedicated pension trust. Here’s the plain version. Like most public agencies, our district carries pension obligations it’s paying down over decades — think of it as a second mortgage. The actuaries tell us those annual payments are going to jump sharply around 2030 to 2033, and that money comes straight out of the same general fund that pays our teachers. So rather than wait for the squeeze, we set up a restricted federal trust and have been steadily banking money into it — a shock absorber, so that when the bill rises, we can pay the increase from the trust instead of from the classroom. I’d advocated for exactly this kind of foresight years earlier at the city level; here we did it even better.

We’ve applied the same discipline to construction. Serving on the Finance and Facilities Committee, I helped move our capital projects — including West Park High School and the district office — to a design-build approach that keeps one accountable team on the hook for delivering on time and on budget, which they have. Fiscal responsibility isn’t about hoarding money. It’s about making sure the dollars are there, year after year, to educate our kids.

I keep coming back to one idea: it’s not our work; it’s the public’s work. Our state constitution is clear that officials do the public’s business, and it should be done in public. Voters delegate their authority to us — and out of respect for that trust, the board should include the community in everything it does. That’s not just a compliance box. When people can watch the real deliberation, they trust the outcome, even when it isn’t the one they wanted.

So we opened things up. Committee meetings that used to happen on short notice behind a closed office door are now publicly noticed, with agendas that describe each item and the full text of every policy up for discussion posted in advance, changes shown in strikeout, so anyone can see exactly what’s changing. I moved board and staff comments to the beginning of meetings — they used to come at the very end, to a mostly empty room — and renamed the confusing old “Audience to Visitors” section to plain “Public Comment,” so people know it’s their time to speak.

I also launched an annual State of the District — cities have a State of the City, and our schools do just as much work that deserves to be reported out to the community in a straightforward, even celebratory setting rather than buried in a board agenda.

The clearest example of transparency paying off was our curriculum review. A hot, divided debate came before the board, and instead of forcing a quick vote, we moved the meeting to a campus theater to fit the crowd, took input only, and did a careful, layered audit — checking state law against board policy against actual practice at each site. That review turned up 599 courses being taught with no record of ever being formally approved by the board. It surprised all of us. We didn’t paper over it; we built a work plan and brought every one of those courses into compliance, out in the open — and by doing it that way, people on all sides of the original debate came away feeling heard.

I want families to experience our district as a genuine partner — one that respects them, keeps them informed, and actually hears them. I take representation seriously: you don’t elect someone to parrot your words back, you entrust them to use good judgment on your behalf, in the open. A school board serves several communities at once — the residents who elect us, the students and families who fill our classrooms, and the teachers and staff who serve them — and all of them deserve to be at the table.

The clearest test of that was our approach to parental notification. Across California, districts on every side of this issue were ending up in court or in labor disputes. I didn’t want to pick a political fight; I wanted to do what’s right for students and families and stand on solid legal ground. So I framed our policy the way the issue actually presents itself to a school — not as any one hot-button topic, but as a universal question: when a student’s privacy and a parent’s right to know are in tension, how do we resolve it, always putting a student’s safety first? We discussed it in public first, worked closely with our teachers, and adopted it unanimously. It has drawn no legal challenge — and other boards have asked to borrow our approach. As I like to put it, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, or even buy new tires. We just needed an alignment.

The other flagship here is our work for military-connected families. My attention was first drawn to the Purple Star School program by a graduate of our own schools who’d gone to work on the issue in Washington. Military kids move six to nine times before they finish high school, and Purple Star recognizes schools that ease those transitions — a staff liaison, dedicated support, a student-led transition program. We applied and earned the designation at four of our school sites, among the first districts in Placer County and the greater region to do so. Now we’re working to help other districts earn it too, with the goal of making our county a model for the whole state.