Questions… and Answers
What Makes Me Best Qualified?I am a senior manager at a $60Billion pension serving 600,000 union auto worker retirees.
25-year professional of finance and governance solving financial and transparency issues for many different businesses and especially for a variety of stakeholders.
I work with global teams with an array of cultural, language and religious backgrounds. I pride myself in understanding progress requires collaboration across all backgrounds.
Expert in technology evaluation and training young professionals in technology, but i think we’ve deployed tech too far and costly in AAPS.
Endorsed by the teacher union and have public comments detailing AAPS revenue vs teacher pay mismatch.
I have three young kids… I’m invested in this!
Goals if Elected?Our kids need our teachers. Our teachers need a fair budget. Showing multi year revenue trends versus total compensation to collective bargaining staff (teachers, OPs, principals) with alerts if they are lagging as they have been recently. This is critical for retention.
Spending across all other categories I would want strictly held under revenue so it's the first source of building the required emergency savings for state mandated fund balance.
To do it: Require individual purchase requests history compared to multi year revenue so it’s clear if it has been giving or taking from our fund balance. If they're also presented in standard publicly viewable reports, and not just discussed out loud like now, a lot would be resolved financially.
Budget Priorities?I have an extensive background in big picture budget and spend review practices, target frameworks, governance and related collaborations across wide arrays of stakeholders. This may be the single most important skill our school board needs right now, and there is not currently, nor has there been recently a Board member or candidate showing close to my ability in this area.
Budget priorities:
1. Request budget forecast scenarios around cutting back private contracts, not just cutting teachers or schools.
2. Have all private contract renewals presented with their historic growth rates versus teacher comps and total revenue.
3. Mandate all private contracts and supplies purchases cannot as whole grow more than slightly below revenue.
Serious Problems to Address?1. Structured transparency. Meetings especially involving Board policies and financial requests, do not have enough depth in what is being shared and showed to the public in either meeting materials or in view during the meetings themselves. Doing so would create a bridge for the public to understand board actions and decision criteria in consistent ways, and should also help the Board and Administration avoid missing check list items for those discussions.
2. Community engagement. I would look to form advisement committees, particularly for groupings of board policies, to both provide a regular public engagement process and have available community advisement at meetings when particular policies are in focus. = Time saving, trust building