Dear Helen -- I'm thrilled that the Daily Post has endorsed my candidacy for school board! (I've included the full text below.) Receiving this strong statement of support is a great honor. The Post joins Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, both state legislators, County Supervisor Joe Simitian, and hundreds of additional elected officials, community leaders, and neighbors in supporting me.
With 20 years of professional experience working for children, and more than a decade of volunteer service for PAUSD students, I am excited to bring my positivemessage of outstanding teaching, continuous learning and improvement, transparent communication, and collaboration to our schools.
Please join me and vote in your absentee ballot today or at the polls on November 4, and forward this message to at least 10 friends today. You can encourage them to learn more on my website and like us onFacebook. If you can, please help us raisethe last $3,000 we need to reach the 41,000 voters in this district. Together, we'll bring forward thinking to PAUSD! Many thanks for all you do!
Warmly,
Catherine
Daily Post, October 17, 2014
Godfrey, Foster for School Board Palo Alto is fortunate to have a strong field of school board candidates, but in our opinion, two candidates rise to the top – Terry Godfrey and Catherine Crystal Foster. Godfrey has outstanding credentials as a past president of the Palo Alto Council of PTAs and the district-wide fundraising organization Palo Alto Partners in Education (PiE). Both posts are logical stepping stones to the school board. She has a solid business background having worked in human resources and finance for 16 years at Xerox and Intel, and then at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as director of finance and strategic planning. The board can use somebody with experience in HR and finance, subjects that constantly come before it. She sat on a committee that studied the foreign language instruction in the elementary schools, but the recommendation to start the program was rejected by the board in 2008 because of its $1 million annual price tag. Now that the district’s finances are stronger, she said it’s an obvious time to consider this idea again. Godfrey co-founded Project Safety Net, the mental health program that arose following a series of suicides by youth. She impresses us as level-headed and serious. She would help the board give the superintendent clear direction, which has been a problem in the past. She has a well-rounded set of experiences that will make her an excellent addition to the school board. Catherine Crystal Foster is a Harvard-trained lawyer who began her career as an advocate for battered immigrant women and their children. She later headed a child-advocacy program at a national nonprofit and then became a policy consultant for organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Children’s Defense Fund. She has served on the PiE board and the Palo Alto Community Fund board. She worked on the 2008 Strong Schools Bond Measure and has served on a site council. She not only talks about getting kids into college, she ran the Peninsula College Fund to help low income, first-generation college students graduate from college. Reducing the achievement gap That experience equips her well to accelerate work to reduce the achievement gap. Foster wants to evaluate current approaches to see what ideas work best. She would like to open a 13th elementary school within three years. Foster has been advocating for foreign language instruction in middle and elementary school for years. All five candidates can analyze data, but Godfrey and Foster have a reputation of working well with colleagues, and listening to students, parents and teachers before making up their minds. If we had a third choice… With only two seats available in this election, we wish we could recommend a third candidate. That third candidate would be Gina Dalma, a senior program officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, who reviews grants for innovative educational programs across the country. She knows what works and what doesn’t in the schools. She is spot-on when she said the district, while high performing, is resting on its laurels and can do more. We’re not sure why another candidate, Jay Cabrera is running. A Gunn graduate, he has run for several other offices before, including Congress, state Assembly, Santa Cruz City Council and San Francisco mayor as a write-in. He told us, “I don’t run with the purpose of winning; I run with the purpose of rethinking elections.” He’s a nice guy but doesn’t have much of a record of involvement in the schools nor knowledge of school issues. The candidate with the most name recognition is Ken Dauber, who came in last place in the election two years ago but is giving it another shot this year. Everyone has an opinion about him. He has staunch supporters and equally fierce opponents. He became prominent about four years ago with his frequent criticisms of the school board, which we felt often crossed the line of civility. He demonized Gunn’s staff and specifically its counseling program after a series of student suicides. A former consultant to the federal Office for Civil Rights, the public has associated him with that office’s frequent investigations into the district over the past few years. In this election, two of his campaign issues are opening a 13th elementary school and adding foreign language instruction to the elementary schools. They’re popular positions, for sure. But while he regularly goes to the microphone at school board meetings, he has seldom brought up these subjects, the minutes of the board meetings show. We think he’s pushing these ideas now to divert attention from his polarizing past. While he has worked hard in this campaign to measure his words, we worry that once elected he would revert to form. Cooperation or confrontation? If you know anything about Dauber, ask yourself this question: If he loses a vote on the board, would he be able to put his feelings aside and work cooperatively with his colleagues on the next issue? Or would he keep bringing up the issue he was outvoted on? It would be reckless of the voters to elect Dauber to the school board. In this election, the two best choices are clear: Godfrey and Foster. | 
