Tam Union school board race draws 5 candidates

Voters in the Tamalpais Union High School District will choose among five candidates running for two trustee positions in the Nov. 5 election.

The candidates are Ray Chaudhuri of Mill Valley, Jennifer Holden of San Anselmo, Amos Klausner of San Geronimo, Nick Ondrejka of Corte Madera and Ida Times-Green of Marin City. The incumbents, Karen Loebbaka and Leslie Harlander, declined to seek reelection.

The district serves about 4,600 students at five high schools and has an annual budget of about $118 million. Approximately 86,000 registered voters live in the district.

Chaudhuri, 53, is a health care executive focused on investments and operations in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He has a daughter at Tamalpais High School.

Chaudhuri said he has worked with the National Institutes of Health “to create global academic partnerships with all the major universities in the world.” He attended “global elementary, middle and high schools in India” and would aim to offer the benefits of that approach to Tam Union schools.

“As the world becomes smaller, students need to be able to understand how to become global citizens,” he said. “Students have added anxiety and stress due to school, peer pressure, social media.”

Holden, 45, a small-business owner, has two children at Archie Williams High School and a third who recently graduated. She has been a volunteer at schools for 13 years and she serves on several parent boards and committees, including the racial/equity committee and the Archie Williams Falcon Foundation.

“I see the role of a board member as one of service to students, parents, caregivers, teachers and the entire community,” Holden said. “I am running to serve the schools and community I cherish and to help enhance the experience for our students.”

Klausner, 52, an art director, has a daughter at Archie Williams and is a coach for the school’s championship-winning mountain bike team. He is a former trustee for the Lagunitas School District, where he also served on the bond oversight committee and the school site council. He also serves on the Marin County Committee on School District Organization, which governs requests for school district territory transfers.

Klausner still serves on the Lagunitas district’s facilities committee and is working to add battery power storage to the district’s solar field.

“I’m running to become a Tam Union trustee because I bring tested leadership to the role,” Klausner said. “I have first-hand experience with how and when districts spend money. I wish I could say that districts spend money wisely, but often they don’t.”

Ondrejka, who will turn 53 on Monday, is owner of a property restoration business in San Rafael. He has 25 years in corporate technology management and served as a member of the district’s fiscal advisory committee. He has a child at Redwood High School and two other children who attended Redwood previously.

“I commit to being a critical thinker who is a caring, collaborative and knowledgeable community member,” Ondrejka said. He said he also commits “to working to improve a diverse and dynamic society.”

“And I commit to demonstrating the values that we expect of our graduates: collaboration, critical thinking, intercultural competence, communication, creative and independent learning and character,” he said.

Times-Green, 63, is a social worker and program coordinator for the Marin County Health and Human Services Department. She served eight years as a trustee for the Sausalito Marin City School District and is a fourth-generation Tamalpais High School graduate.

Times-Green, a longtime resident of Marin City, would be the first Black woman to serve on the Tam Union board.

“Representation matters, and if elected to the board, it may encourage others from the BIPOC community to run for public office,” Times-Green said, using the acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. “I was born to serve, and this is my way of giving back to my community and the county.”

All five candidates said they support Measure B, the $289 million bond proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot. They had mixed views on Measure A, the $517 million bond proposal whose defeat in March prompted the leaner version.

“I did support Measure A, but I think it was an overreach,” Holden said.

“I understand why people didn’t support it,” she added. “Measure B is so much better.”

Holden said she would support more immediate attention to repairs and maintenance, instead of saving up those items for a bond measure.

Klausner did not support Measure A, he said, because it was “too big.”

“There’s an affordability crisis starting to hit Marin County,” he said. “We’re still paying off the previous bond.”

All candidates expressed an imperative to improve academic achievement. Ondrejka and Chaudhuri said they would enhance the focus on offering pathways to students who prefer trades career training instead of going to college.

“Each student is different,” Chaudhuri said. “We need to find ways to personalize instruction to meet the student interests.”

A majority of the candidates did not approve of the district’s spending $480,000 this year on consultants to work individually with students of color at Tam High to close the achievement gap.

Holden said the spending should be made to help teachers in the classroom, so as to offer help to all students to improve academics.

“Spending $450 an hour for someone to oversee the racial justice task force is actually an embarrassment that they can’t seem to do it for themselves,” Holden said.

Ondrejka said it was a “good investment, but without necessarily well-defined outcomes.”

He and others said that anti-racism attitudes should be fostered earlier than high school.

“The bullying behavior starts in middle school,” he said.

Times-Green, who supported the contracts, said she knew all the consultants personally and that they have been doing the work for children of color in the district for “decades.”

“Why we are paying for it was that last October, there was a racial incident,” she said. “We all came together to start doing the work.”

Although the contracts are intended to close the achievement gap, and not necessarily to combat racism, “you can’t close the achievement gap until you deal with the elephant in the room — racism,” Times-Green said.

The candidates mostly did not support a proposal for the district to spend about $137,000 to buy locking cellphone pouches for the students to reduce the distractions and other negative effects. The pouches are overkill and presented problems in an emergency, especially with students leaving school at lunchtime, Holden said.

“They need their phones to pay for lunch,” she said. “Or, if they get into an accident.”

The candidates said they were satisfied with the current system of having rows of open pockets or caddies hanging on the classroom wall for the students to place their phones at the beginning of each class.

“Can you imagine the lineup of parents waiting to pick up their kids at the end of the day, while the kids are in a long lineup to unlock their pouches?” Klausner said. “It’s so unworkable.”