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The San Ramon Valley Unified School District offices in Danville saw two new fresh faces join two longtime incumbents last week for a candidate forum ahead of this year’s school board election cycle, which consists of a two-way race for Area 5 and two other candidates unopposed.
Newcomers Amanda Butland and Joel Woods had their first opportunity to sit at the dais in the district’s boardroom for the Sept. 17 event hosted and moderated by DanvilleSanRamon.com, with incumbents Susanna Ordway and Rachel Hurd in familiar territory at the same boardroom they have met in regularly throughout nearly a decade of Board of Education meetings together.
Butland, the sole candidate to emerge as a successor to current Area 1 trustee Jesse vanZee after he announced he would not be seeking reelection, has earned the seat uncontested effective after the election is certified, as has Area 4’s Ordway, who was unopposed for a third term.
While the event served as an opportunity for Butland and Ordway to showcase their platforms and engage with voters despite their uncontested races, it was also aimed at highlighting the similarities and differences between platforms for Woods and Hurd, the two candidates in this year’s only competitive school board race for Area 5.
Now in her fifth term on the board, Hurd emphasized the work she has helped accomplish during her lengthy tenure and a desire to continue it. Woods, in his first-ever political campaign, sought to bring a fresh perspective from inside the classroom in his work as a substitute teacher and to share his thoughts and research into how he feels the district could improve.
While the two Area 5 candidates differ in their backgrounds and perspectives – and Woods’ move to challenge the longtime incumbent as a first-time candidate was a bold one – the competitive race did not show signs of much contention that evening, with the two candidates primarily aligned in their priorities for the district despite diverging in some of their approaches.
Both candidates acknowledged and emphasized SRVUSD’s ongoing financial challenges, including a sharper than expected drop in district-wide enrollment in the current school year and reduced funding overall for school districts across the country in recent years, compounding the district’s years-long structural deficit, and offered a range of ideas for potential solutions.
“The challenge with our funding is that almost everything we do is done by people – 90% of our budget is people – and so if you’re trying to give services for students, you don’t want them to be one-off things,” Hurd said. “You need them to be permanent things.”
Hurd pointed to the “up and down cycle” of what primarily comes as one-time funding from the state amid cost of living increases that state funding fails to offset.
“It just keeps an ongoing stress on being able to adequately pay our employees what they deserve,” Hurd said.”They are 90% of the budget, and so we end up in this constant fight over money.”
Hurd and Woods both pointed to the challenges of the average daily attendance formula for state funding in particular amid a district-wide enrollment decline, despite an increase in ADA and growing enrollment at some of the district’s schools, particularly in San Ramon. Woods said he saw potential for increasing that enrollment even further to offset the drops in other parts of the district.
“So what I’ve been able to do through some research is find that there’s areas where we can increase our average daily attendance, so if we can increase it by 1-1/2 or 2% that can bring in between $4 (million) and $8 million more into the district that would cut our deficit by a good amount,” Woods said.
Both candidates also emphasized the importance of maintaining adequate staffing levels, sustainable class size ratios, and support for faculty and staff amid spending cuts brought on by the ongoing fiscal landscape in recent years, but differed in their perspectives.
“Clearly, (teachers) would like to lower class size; they would like to keep or add counselors; they would like to restore positions that were cut in those cuts – I’m open to all of those ideas if we can figure out how to pay for them,” Hurd said.
“The idea that any of the board members liked these cuts is just kind of silly,” she continued. “Those cuts were made because the buck stops with us. We have to keep the district financially sound. So if we can come up with ways to restore ongoing funding, I’m very much for those goals.”
Woods said he had a number of ideas on how to improve working conditions for faculty and staff based on his conversations and experiences working in the school system.
“I’ve had some ideas of my own to help, and one of a few of the things I want to do is – you know, providing funding obviously – I want to bring graders into every school … not one for every teacher but shared throughout the school,” Woods said.
“It’s going to lessen the workload for teachers, and then by lessening the load they have more time to individually be with these kids, not just in the class and required hours, but after school kids come in,” he continued. “Teachers won’t be stressed as much because they won’t have a pile of papers to grade.”
The two candidates also differed on their top priorities for the district and plans for pursuing them, with Hurd pointing to an ongoing project she has been working on for years and Woods pointing to how he would like to increase the district’s community engagement and relationships.
“Our district has been working on creating structures for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support for a long time,” Hurd said. “What is exciting to see this year is us expanding what was tried and tested at certain sites, which were called themed focus schools, and have proven the concept. And now we’re taking that district-wide, with each site having a say, a direction, a choice in how they do that.”
“It’s the way we can, finally in a systematic way, ensure that our students that are lower achieving or struggling in certain subject areas can get the extra support and intervention they really need to catch up, and that has been one of my passion projects really ever since I’ve been on the board,” Hurd said. “But it’s super exciting to see it actually coming to fruition, not in a one-off way, but a permanent way.”
Woods said he would focus his comments on “one of the easiest things to do, but there’s many”.
“In our high schools there’s something called senior ditch day, so that one day caused the disturbance of over $140,000,” Woods said. “So one thing I want to change is just with that, we supply a senior trip that is in place of the senior ditch day. And by doing that it’s going to be an educational chance if you go to say, Six Flags, something that the kids would like, and that gets the district money instead of not getting anything.”
Woods said that making kids look forward to going to school overall by creating more open and comfortable relationships between students and adults at schools could also reduce absences, and therefore lost ADA revenue.
Other topics that evening included the overarching impacts of state and national issues locally in the district, grading reform and student safety. To see the candidates’ full answers to all questions, watch the video at the bottom of this story or via this link to YouTube here. The forum was moderated by DanvilleSanRamon associate publisher and editorial director Jeremy Walsh and this reporter.
Although not in competitive races, Butland and Ordway fully participated in last week’s forum and offered their perspectives on the range of issues discussed.
It was one of the first opportunities for Butland to engage in a public event at the district with her constituents-to-be, with her campaign launched earlier this year having taken the back burner for many voters as no additional candidates emerged.
Butland’s uncontested race for the Area 1 seat is in sharp contrast to the competitive three-way race for the seat in 2022 that saw vanZee narrowly beat out runner-up Michelle Petersen by less than 300 votes.
A longtime parent and volunteer with the district, Butland said she was eager to bring her expertise as a banking leader specializing in auditing, compliance and risk management to the district at the start of next year, and that she was confident in her ability to help contend with its financial challenges.
“Stepping forward to this board is sort of a natural progression of that service,” Butland said. “I’m running to build upon our district’s strong foundation and bring a fresh perspective. I also believe that every family deserves to be heard. I am here to listen to all perspectives and to thoughtfully figure out what it is we need to do as a board.”
Butland said that the district’s financial challenges would “require innovative, disciplined solutions,” such as Superintendent CJ Cammack’s recommendation – later approved by the board – to relocate the district offices to a new site in San Ramon that also generates tenant revenue, while poised to sell off the current offices at 699 Old Orchard Drive.
“As a risk management and compliance and audit professional, I feel like I bring the technical discipline needed to evaluate these complex decisions, to protect taxpayer dollars, and to keep funding where it belongs in our classrooms,” Butland said.
Ordway is set to be sworn in for her third full term on the board after being appointed in 2018, and remaining the unchallenged representative of Area 4 ever since.
“My husband and I have been residents of the city of San Ramon for over 32 years,” Ordway said. “I’ve not only been a parent with this school district when my two now-adult children went through the schools in our school district, but I also worked for SRVUSD as a classroom paraeducator and an instructional assistant for over seven years.”
“From when my kids attended Iron Horse Middle School, I have been very active in various levels of PTA, including school site level, council level, and even at the Contra Costa County level,” she continued.
Since joining the board, Ordway has been a delegate for the California School Board Association “that advocated for our school district to state legislators” and shed light on challenges specific to the district.
“For the past 10 years, I have been an independent college counselor working with high school students and their parents to plan and navigate the college application process, and I get to discuss admissions policies with various colleges and universities,” Ordway said. “In this role, I am able to pass along information to our district administrators that helps our school district think about how we need to support students so they can be successful post high school.”
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