Terry Godfrey, candidate for PAUSD School Board
Why are you running for school board?
What skills and experience do you bring to the role of school board member?
What are the biggest strengths of PAUSD?
What are the biggest challenges of PAUSD?
How can you implement change in a district with a strong culture of school autonomy?
Is PAUSD ready for the Common Core and new California test?
How should PAUSD move forward from the OCR resolution?
Should PAUSD open new schools to ease overcrowding?
What should PAUSD do with Cubberley?
What is one thing you want Palo Alto voters to know about you?
Why are you running for PAUSD School Board?
My kids have been in PAUSD since elementary school and they are now in high school. My commitment to youth is deep and long standing. I am a supporter and product of public education and have been around our schools for more than a decade. I have a lot of leadership experience in our schools, as PTA council president, as a founder and leader of Project Safety Net and most recently as the President of the PiE (Partners in Education) board. I have led efforts to raise money for PAUSD schools, get social emotional programs in place, and represent parent voice. I also have experience rolling up my sleeves and working with kids. I have done a Chili Cookoff with teens, recently led the Caring Neighbors Team, and been involved in other ways to engage youth and recognize youth as resources.
In addition, the School Board is made up of five people and it’s important to have a group of people that represent a mix of skills and experience. Where my experience is different from the sitting board members and the other candidates is in finance and organizational management. I’ve worked for 25 years professionally in finance and human resource roles, including managing big budgets – for example the $300 million budget for Intel’s European unit. I’ve also worked in organizational design and analysis of organizations and how they can be effective. The district is complex and we need some perspective from a finance and organizational design point of view.
Considering the three domains of board responsibility- administrative oversight, policy setting and judicial oversight- what are the experiences and skills you bring to be an effective school board member in these areas?
On the fiscal side, I’ve worked many years in finance. I still work as a finance director for a national immigration coalition called the New Americans Campaign, which based at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and funded by private foundations to help legal permanent residents get through the citizenship process.
In terms of setting policy, I would point to my experience at Intel, where I worked for more than a decade. There we had a large, centralized organization. We developed guidelines and outcomes to get specific things done and hold people accountable for meeting targets. I have a lot experience with this dynamic of leveraging a decentralized organization to meet expectations that are consistent.
In terms of the judicial role, one of my roles at Intel was the Human Resources Director for a 2,000-person organization. As a director, it was my job to know when we needed legal advice and when we needed other resources and perspectives. It is important to ensure that speculation about pending legal issues isn’t a distraction or a hindrance as it is not helpful for reaching resolution.
What’s your vision for this school district and how is that aligned with from the vision that PAUSD just released last spring?
Over the past 18 months, PAUSD struggled to get a vision put on paper. The difficulty of that process is not a surprise for a large and complex organization. There’s nothing in the current vision that I would disagree with, but the way I think about our district is a little more succinct.
For me, a vision of PAUSD is that it’s an innovative, student-centered district where healthy, engaged students are achieving their definitions of success.
If we make decisions and students are not at the top of the list, things don’t go well. We have a population that is very open to innovation and if you do it with a feedback loop, people want to try new things. The notion of healthy kids includes social emotional development. This has been a focus of the district for the past few years but there is more to be done.
Every kid’s definition of success is different and we want to support these different definitions. The district has a baseline, which is that all kids graduate with A-G requirements starting with the class of 2016. But beyond this, all kids have their own paths. Some want to many different experiences to figure out what to do with their lives, while others are more focused on a particular school that they want to attend.
What are the biggest strengths of PAUSD?
Our teaching corps is talented and dedicated. A lot of our teachers made a conscious effort to come back to Palo Alto and become teachers. For example, through my son, I know the lacrosse coach at Paly who graduated from PAUSD, returned as an elementary aide and is now in a classroom at Paly.
Our engaged parents are also a strength of PAUSD. They are supportive with volunteer hours, donations, and giving other resources. We make more considered decisions because parents are engaged.
We are a unified school district, which means we can have vertical articulation across the grades and we can have soft handoffs from elementary to middle school and middle school to high school. Being a unified district is sometimes harder to deal with, but it’s an advantage.
Also our overall community is supportive of our public schools. I’ve been talking to folks who haven’t had kids in the district for years but they still step up with parcel taxes and donations, and are still engaged. So you want to do well for the community because people are interested in our youth and our schools. It’s amazing.
What are the biggest challenges of PAUSD?
Parents in Palo Alto are a strength, but they can be challenging. Teachers sometimes feel pressure to perform or respond to parents, which is an issue as we consider including parent input into decisions like tenure. However, the good outweighs the bad regarding parents in Palo Alto.
We are such a high performing school district that if you an average kid or above average kid in PAUSD, you can feel lost. It is said that if you are in the 25th percentile in Palo Alto, you are in the 75% percentile in the nation. But kids don’t see it this way. As a student-centered district, you want every kid to feel successful.
We haven’t mastered the centralized vs. decentralized model in Palo Alto. It’s an opportunity because I’ve seen it work well and think we can get there. If we had more systems for managing this dynamic, we could test and share new ideas and best practices.
How do you implement change in a district with a strong culture of school autonomy?
The school board needs to set the expectation that the senior leadership of PAUSD do some benchmarking in terms of best practices. The Associate Superintendent and Directors for Elementary and Secondary Education have the responsibility for seeing where we are doing well and where we can do better. While we have great individual things happening at different schools, we need to leverage these ideas across the district. When I was at Intel, we had a decentralized system, which was great for hiring or budgeting because it empowered individuals. But for areas that impacted safety or product quality, there was a set of specific guidelines called “copy exact,” which were used in manufacturing where consistency is critical.
From a district perspective we can think about this same approach. We need to figure out within PAUSD what has to be “copy exact” and where there is leeway. For example, the kids at Ohlone have a different experience than the kids at Escondido and that’s probably alright as long as the outcome we expect is the same.
In PAUSD our “copy exact” elements include anything to do with child safety, such as the bullying policy, where procedures need to be easy to understand, easy to navigate and have clear outcomes.
We have a community that has a culture of entrepreneurism and our parents are open to changing things as long as there is a ‘plan b’ if needed, the outcomes are clear and the hurdles to implementation are known. People are less receptive to plans that are not well developed.
Is Palo Alto ready for the Common Core and new California test?
Common Core is the first nationally mandated standards in a long time. As implementation gets closer and people look at Common Core more carefully, there is more resistance. But California has adopted it, and PAUSD has been pretty effective at equipping teachers with time and space to get ready. I am not sure if there are curricula or textbooks are aligned with Common Core yet, but the transition will take time and require resources. Budgeting is the place where there is board leverage in these areas, such as looking to see if there is enough funding for professional development or the best materials.
With the new test, I don’t know when we will have it in place. The expectation is next fall but I understand that is uncertain. In the meantime we need to ensure we have measures in place to understand how our district is doing and to set a baseline.
How should PAUSD move forward from the OCR resolution?
Our community and the OCR both want the same outcome, which is that we do what’s best for our kids. Listening to the board discuss the resolution you could hear their frustration, but the way forward is to learn from this situation and establish policies that are well understood, transparent, and easily accessible to parents, teachers, et al. I think this would go a long way towards ensuring our students are better served and rebuilding trust with our families and community.
What should PAUSD do with Cubberley?
Cubberley is a treasured community resource and I believe the City and school district should be able to start by recognizing their shared goals. From an outsider’s perspective the negotiations seem to have limped along unproductively, but the arrival of a new superintendent and other leaders may restart them on a more positive note.
Should PAUSD open new schools to ease overcrowding?
We will have to consider our options for dealing with our enrollment growth. I believe over the last five years or so growth has been 20+% in the south, almost flat in the north and in between in the west. Our community values neighborhood schools (which suggests another elementary school) and peer streaming (which suggest another middle school), but opening new schools requires resources and commitment. However, given the projected growth and these priorities, it’s likely that we will have to add capacity and address attendance boundaries. I can’t say yet exactly what or where because these issues require consideration, but I expect those decisions will be part of capacity planning for the future.
What is one final thing you want Palo Alto voters to know about you?
It is harder to govern than it is to advocate. The experiences and priorities I bring to the table lead me to governing and leadership. I listen to people thoroughly, understand nuances and details and come to a decision that recognizes all sides of the problem. As an advocate, headlines and sound bites are effective, but this is not an approach for leading. I have a personality and method that allows me to govern in a way that represents the whole community, and I have a vision that will help our district become even more effective for all students. I don’t have an axe to grind or a single issue other than our district being student centered. We need to have a thoughtful approach for how to reach this goal.
Visit Terry Godfrey’s website to learn more.
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