Looking back on your time as a school board member and board president of Poway USD, what accomplishments are you most proud of, and what impact did it have on students or the broader community?

There are a few accomplishments I am proud of. The main one was making sure our budgets matched our values and our vision for our students and their outcomes. We really focused our budgetary priorities on things that would make a difference for the students and what they were asking for. We were able to put more money into career technical education programs and expand pathways. We built a middle college to help our students that would slip through the cracks normally find a pathway to opportunities; we got feedback such as “I never thought I could be a student body president,” “I never thought I could form a band or write a musical.” These students were able to find their own joy and unlock their potential through middle college.

We were also able to expand support for our robotics and engineering programs at Westview High. We got their ugly, rusty portables taken out and built them a beautiful engineering facility that’s tall enough to fit their robot that shoots basketballs. We were able to really look at our budget, even our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] program that we put in place, which was an equity program including our students with disabilities and our marginalized communities. We often forget our students with disabilities when we talk about marginalized student groups, but we were able to bring everyone into that framework.

You served on the Poway USD board during a period of significant fiscal and governance challenges. How did that experience shape your views on accountability and leadership in public education?

It did give me a profound appreciation for local control and how and where that needs to be asserted, but also where state policies can be helpful in shepherding through some bigger picture problems. Like with COVID, we really were looking for guidance from state government because if one LEA [local educational agency] made a decision, but a neighboring LEA made a different decision, that would create a lot of challenges. For that community space, it was nice in that moment to have state leadership, but for things like how to allocate resources based on priorities, we learned very clearly that local control was really important.

How does your experience as a daughter of immigrants shape your approach to education and public policy?

As the daughter of immigrants, there were times in my life where my father was unemployed and, my mom didn’t know what kinds of resources were available to our family. It was our teachers that noticed that my brothers and I were kind of struggling with food security and other issues. A teacher pulled my mom aside and explained to her how to access resources and supports and got us on the reduced-price meal program — even though that wasn’t her job as a teacher. Her job was to educate us, but she understood as an educator that her job was more than educating a kid. It was to make sure they were coming to school ready to learn. I think many teachers hold that same viewpoint and perspective. That little pink ticket opened the door for me to see teachers as human and as community caregivers.

That was foundational for me in my approach to public education and my interest in accessing it. When it came time for me to put my own children into the public education system, I was the first one to raise my hand and volunteer in the classroom and I would always ask the teachers, “How do you want me to show up for you?” rather than “I want to do X, Y, Z?” And I learned how to do everything from the copy machine to the Ditto machine to cutting leaf shapes or collating papers, it didn’t matter. Whatever the teacher needed is how I offered support. And in that same vein, when it came time that the community was looking for a new school board trustee, I said, “For the teachers, absolutely. I want to make sure that they’re able to continue to teach the next generation of children.”

What motivated you to run for State Assembly? Why was it important to you to take on a leadership role in shaping education policy at the state level as Assembly Education chair?

I had the wonderful opportunity of serving on several CSBA committees as a Delegate, which started in year two of when I was on the board of education in Poway Unified. That gave me exquisite insight into the relationship between our LEAs, how we advocate at the state level and then how policymakers shape policy. It was in my time in the Policy Platform Committee and as a member of the Legislation and Advocacy Committee that I was able to see how state policies are shaped and our role in informing those policies. One thing I learned was that it’s not always the case that representatives in state government fully understand the implementation or operationalization of a policy, how that’s going to work on the ground, and being on the receiving end of a lot of massive state shifts in programming from universal transitional kindergarten (UTK) to universal meals to community schools.

There have been a number of massive programs that have been rolled out in the past several years and on top of that, you layer COVID. On top of that, you layer an affordability crisis where staff can’t find housing in your community. So, we’re having staffing challenges — especially in our classified positions such as school bus drivers, instructional assistants and paraprofessionals — and then funding instability where we had to hire counselors, let go of counselors, hire librarians, let go of librarians. All of that showed me that we needed that local perspective to come to Sacramento and be at the policymaking table.

As chair of the Assembly Education Committee, what do you see as the top issues/priorities for California’s K–12 system over the next few years?

It is certainly my honor to serve as Education Committee chair. I could not have imagined this happening in my tenure in the Assembly so soon, but it is truly a joy to be serving in this capacity. I think our largest challenge is fiscal: instability of funding and not knowing whether we’re going to get all the resources we need to deliver the services and supports to our students. It’s not just having to compensate staff adequately to make sure they’re able to afford to live in our communities. In a typical LEA budget, 85 percent will go toward salaries and benefits. That means we’re service-oriented, and if we can’t meet the needs of those providing the services, then we’re going to have trouble recruiting and retaining the best talent. Instability in our budgets creates instability in our workforce and how we’re able to deliver.

There’s also the compounding challenge of declining enrollment. We see more schools facing receivership than we’ve ever seen before. So, what are we doing to help prepare communities for these really difficult fiscal decisions — whether it’s going to be school consolidation, perhaps unification or any other number of solutions to address these challenges? The reality is we’re seeing declining enrollment at the rate of around 1.3 percent; that might sound like a small number, but 1.3 percent of 6 million children is quite a large number.

Regardless, we still have to maintain staffing ratios at a certain level — even though we may get less money per pupil because we have declining enrollment, it doesn’t mean we’re hiring fewer staff. We have declining revenues in our school system. The expenses are not coming down and facing that head on, I think, is genuinely the largest challenge. If schools are adequately resourced, they can solve most of the problems on their own, but there are all these fiscal challenges.

On the pupil side, I think the second-largest problem our LEAs are facing is trying to find enduring ways to close the achievement gap. But our children are also facing a hope gap, and whether it’s their worries about their self-esteem, whether it’s social media-driven or peer-driven, how they identify themselves, how they see themselves — there is a genuine lack of confidence that they will be able to realize the American dream, that they will have a better life than their parents did.

The downward pressures of college and career coming into lower and lower grade levels, the expectations for them to be able to succeed combined with existential thoughts about the environment and the world — there are a lot of stresses that our children are facing. And I think the responsibility to address those stresses is falling more upon public education rather than our public health system or our county health departments. We’re seeing schools having to step up and fill that gap in ways that were unexpected in a traditional school model.

You are authoring one of CSBA’s sponsored SOS for Student Achievement: Close the State Accountability Gap bills to create a state-level plan to hold itself accountable and support LEAs in closing achievement gaps. What do you see as the most effective actions the state can take to help LEAs close these gaps?

I think because we have this package of bills, mine being [Assembly Bill] 2225, it shows that there needs to be external pressure put on the California Department of Education (CDE) to step up and address the persisting problems. We’ve acknowledged very publicly that there is a fractured governance system within California that allows people to keep passing the hot potato back and forth, and nobody knows who is accountable for what. What our package of bills is asking is for the state to do a little self-reflection at the state level — not at the pupil level, not at the instructional classroom level — on what we are doing as a state through our laws and our policies, through the way the CDE is structured, the way the governor interfaces with that and with policy initiatives put through the budget process.

There are so many things influencing the way public education is delivered that it is time now to do some self-reflection and see whether we’ve got the formula right. As a scientist, I’m always open to reassessing the experiment and making sure we’re getting the outcomes that we want. I hope this whole package of bills gets signed by the Governor so we can start tackling these issues in a very productive, self-reflective way.

Having worked at both the local and state levels, how should the state balance support and oversight while respecting local control and empowering board members in LEAs?

I think part of this is in the competency and the functionality of the LEA. When we have high-performing school board trustees that are very engaged in focusing on student-centered initiatives, there will naturally be a reduced interest from the state government to intervene. When LEAs are doing their jobs, when they’re empowered to do their jobs, we’re going to see high-functioning systems; but when LEAs aren’t able to deliver in the ways that we would expect them to for a variety of reasons, that’s when we see either financial hardship, outcomes hardship, or just not meeting the needs of what the students are asking for. That’s when you see state government or state policymakers coming in and suggest, “Oh, well, this is happening in my LEA, in my assembly district, therefore we must need a state policy to address this issue because they’re not resolving it at the LEA level.” I think if all school board trustees get quality training and continue to support good policies that makes sense in the contemporary education system, then our LEAs will be able to function with a high degree of competency and state won’t need to intervene.

Of course, there needs to be state resources to help with these high-profile hot-button issues and even more so when the state is putting these programs in place. For example, Universal Transitional Kindergarten was a state-driven initiative. There should be adequate state resources when the policy is launched to make sure there’s an appropriate workforce and facilities and curriculum and instructional materials. Another example is late start, which is a particular pain point for me. People thought, “Oh, it’s just an hour difference in time. How could this cost money?” But if they had surveyed our local LEAs adequately, they would have seen there is going to be a cost because highly effective, efficient, multi-tiered bus schedules would now have to be flattened and there would be additional resources required for busing. My school district had to cancel busing all together for general education students. These are the kinds of things that I would love to see us tackle and make sure that when we do have state policies, they’re adequately resourced for successful implementation without negative secondary effects.

When you think about long-term success in education policy, what outcomes matter most to you, and how should the Legislature hold itself accountable for delivering results?

I think school districts and legislators need to form stronger bonds together so that we understand each other’s issues. As an Assemblymember, I represent my district. For me, that means I need to check in with my local school districts and I check in with my superintendents on a regular basis. I check in with the trustees that I’ve built relationships over the years and even with parents in the community to try and get the pulse of the district. If there are trends and patterns we can see, that is something that I would want to address. As an Assemblymember, one of the first things I did was request the speaker grant me chairmanship of a select committee on youth mental health and treatment access.

That was partly driven out of the concerns I had for rollout of the California Youth Behavioral Health Initiative and the responsibilities that put onto school districts for filing reimbursement paperwork when that was not their real area of expertise and appropriate training was not provided. For me, if we’re going to pass these policies at a state level, we need to be checking in with our LEAs first and make sure that this is a statewide issue rather than a regional issue. Because at the end of the day, while we represent our Assembly district, the policies that we pass impact everyone across the state. What I recommend to our trustees is to reach out and have regular meetings with their assemblymember to make sure they are kept in the loop of what is working, what is not working and what would be helpful.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.