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Experience matters on the School Board, and I bring 35 years of experience in solving problems collaboratively and getting things done. This is what I do every day as CEO of a SF healthcare company with 500+ employees. Managing $1B budgets is not foreign to me. In fact, I have worked for Fortune 100 companies in six continents (speak English, French, Chinese), headed up regions and businesses, and collaborated with all types of groups to achieve financial and operational results. Having been CEO multiple times gives me the unique ability to turnaround businesses, which is what is needed given the fiscal crisis at SFUSD. I know how to grow revenues along with reducing costs. I believe strongly in education as a mother and product of public schools myself. I hold two bachelor’s degrees from Penn, two master’s from MIT and Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins. The Board needs the experience I bring to grow our schools, not close them, and bring families back to public schools as well as to push for a stronger curriculum by bringing back core subjects: math, science, languages, and the arts. Join me to make good education a right for our children.

• Bring solutions that address the near-term fiscal crisis and longer-term growth.
o Closing schools is not the answer; it will only make things worse and drive more families away from public schools. It will also make the existing schools more crowded and class sizes even larger; the schools that are targeted for closure are the smaller schools and specialty schools that are much needed in our communities. Closing schools also does not solve the budget deficit.
o We need to address the fiscal crisis in the next few months and will need to make hard decisions in the near-term so that SFUSD survives; costs will need to be addressed, both direct and indirect costs. The administration’s costs have grown exponentially while enrolment has declined drastically over the past several years. We need to reduce the administration’s costs and manage the district’s assets more effectively.
o In parallel, we will need to invest in the longer-term growth of enrollment, investing in schools, upgrading of our curriculum, raising performance of educators, and working with our communities to implement change.
o This is solvable and I know how to do this; I do this everyday as CEO. Balancing the budget, managing multi-billion-dollar budgets and organizations of thousands is not foreign to me. I have the necessary skills and experience; I have turned around organizations many times. We need people like me who can do this and do it on Day 1. Experience matters at this time to solve the near-term fiscal crisis.
• Increase enrollment and bring families back to SF public schools.
o Assess the 125+ schools in our district and really understand their needs. In business we always start with the customer in mind and work backwards to develop the right solutions. The SFUSD “customers” are the families, students, teachers, and schools.
o Develop the improvement areas for each school with the “customers” and then overlay it with the SFUSD administration needs. This needs to be both a bottoms up and top-down assessment so that the best solutions can be developed. We need to do the hard work of understanding our “customers;” everyone is interested in keeping and making SF public schools the best and keeping our schools open.
o When we invest in our schools, they will be more competitive in the marketplace and families will come back to public schools; we can look at best practices within the U.S. as well as at models in Europe and Asia.
• Invest in our schools and move resources from the administration to where it is needed – the schools.
o There is plenty of money in the budget (over $1.2 billion) and yet the money does not trickle down to the schools.
o While enrollment has declined sharply, administration costs and budgets have increased.
o Look for revenue sources and funding at the federal, state, and local levels; exhaust all options on revenue sources inclusive of grants and bonds.
o Streamline the administration and implement position control as well as indirect spend management.
o The savings from the above can then be used to invest in our schools.
• Develop robust curriculum that focuses on the bringing back the basics of education and offering accelerated courses; we need to arm our children to be competitive in the global economy.
o Start early with core subjects like math, science, history, and foreign languages in elementary and middle schools; offer accelerated courses and gifted programs; keep the language immersion program.
o Raise the bar on performance for all schools and ensure that we challenge our students and not hold them back; they can and should accelerate.
o Ensure that specialty schools that support our communities and our families are resourced.
• Bring back educators that are good and want to teach; pay them fairly and expect excellence.
o Work with the administration and the union to retain and attract good teachers back to the school system; ensure that we expect high performance and strong competencies from our educators.
o Give educators a career path and leverage them as assets; they have ideas that we should listen to and incorporate.
• Really engage with parents and community in school improvements; they know the solutions and can help with implementation.
o Visit and meet with schools, parents, teachers and especially principals to truly understand their needs and ideas for improvement.
o Involve them in the assessment of schools, idea generation and implementation; they are our most valued assets, and they can help.