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Sundar Subbarayan
Retired tech executive| votesundar.org
Top priorities
- Bettering academic outcomes
- Careful spending and investments
- Improving community relationships
Community involvement
- MVWSD Parcel Tax Oversight Committee (2015-2016)
- PACT Foundation member, MVWSD (2016)
- AVID classroom mentor for high school students (2018, 2019, 2020, 2026)
- Mentor Tutor Connection tutor (2025, 2026) and mentor (2026)
- Basis Independent High School teacher (Summer 2024)
Mountain View resident Sundar Subbarayan is vying for a seat on the Mountain View Whisman School Board after years of volunteering in the district because he’s passionate about public education.
He is one of four candidates running for two at-large seats on the five-member board. He’s challenging fellow newcomer Quintin Riis and incumbents Bill Lambert and Devon Conley for one of the two open slots.
Subbaryan started volunteering in local classrooms when his children were students in the Mountain View Whisman School District. As their education progressed, he also began volunteering in the Mountain View Los Altos High School District. His children graduated from Los Altos High School in 2023 and 2026.
He also helped implement Khan Academy – a Mountain View-based online learning platform – into the Mountain View Los Altos High School, Mountain View Whisman and Los Altos school districts.
Subbarayan said he seriously considered a bid for a seat on both the Mountain View Whisman and Mountain View Los Altos school boards this election cycle. Ultimately, he said, he chose to run for the Mountain View Whisman School District because the district itself needed extra help, especially considering student achievement.
“For good or for bad, I feel like between the two, MVWSD probably needed more attention, more things to set right, so to speak,” Subbarayan told the Voice in a recent interview. “The achievement gaps were higher.”
Mountain View Whisman has made slight improvements to standardized testing scores over the last few years, with .84- and 0.2-point increases in English and math scores, respectively, from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 school years. But scores were significantly lower for Latino and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
Subbarayan said that if he’s on the board, he would like to see more intricate and in-depth data to understand how – and why – the students are struggling specifically, so the district can better address those reasons.
He wanted to look at more effective metrics of student performance and success other than the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. District students take the assessment every spring and are tested on math and English based on their grade level, and it compares their learning to the state’s standards by grade.
While he said the district is trending in the right direction, he doubted if the results are helpful for understanding how students may do in the long-run.
“There’s a big range for at-grade level and a big range for at-about grade level, so you could be falling, with the raw scores, within each of those buckets,” he said. “You might still look like you’re doing well, but then two years later, you’ll see you have done worse.”
Part of educating students well and increasing student learning is maintaining and hiring talented educators, Subbarayan said, but the budget may make that difficult moving forward.
Subbarayan noted his career background, which includes managing million-dollar budgets for companies including Microsoft, would especially lend itself to a term on the board. Despite the district’s recent and upcoming budget cuts, Subbarayan said spending is top-heavy and district pay and bonuses should be addressed first.
Currently, the Mountain View Whisman School board is in the process of making budget cuts, which should go into effect in January 2027. Unlike $7.4 million the district trimmed from its budget in January 2026, which included the elimination of a number of district office positions and nightly custodial services, the upcoming cuts will affect employees that directly work with students.
He would not be in favor of reducing teacher pay or not providing raises because of the impact it may have on children.
“One of my pillars is student achievement,” he said. “When we have teacher turnovers, that’s going to affect student achievement.”
