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Ana Kristina Reed is running for a seat on the Mountain View Whisman school board to restore trust in the district and put the focus on improving students’ experiences in local schools.
Reed is a middle school electives teacher in the Cupertino Union School District, where she teaches classes including food science and fashion design and crafts. She also works part-time for the Santa Clara County Office of Education on curriculum design. Her children have attended Mountain View Whisman schools and she has volunteered on campus.
There is mistrust and tension within the community, Reed said. In recent months, Mountain View Whisman has faced controversy on multiple fronts, including over spending on certain contracts. Parents don’t feel like they are being heard and are therefore scrutinizing the district’s actions, Reed said.
“That wouldn’t be the case if there was more trust in the decision-making process,” she said. “If they felt like they were being heard, and they felt like some of their concerns were being addressed, then we could start to build that trust and become more of a partnership in the education of their children.”
Getting involved in politics and running for the school board was never something Reed intended to do, she told the Voice. Last school year, Reed’s two children ran into issues with Mountain View Whisman’s disciplinary system, which she said wasn’t through any fault of their own.
When Reed began to learn more about discipline in the school district, she found outdated policies and statistics showing disparities based on a student’s background. In 2023, 4.9% of Latino students were suspended for at least one day in Mountain View Whisman, compared to 1.9% of white students and 0.8% of Asian students, according to state data.
Reed began advocating for changes and ended up filing a U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights complaint against the school district, alleging discrimination against her son and other students at Graham Middle School.
When Reed and her children spoke at a school board meeting last spring, she said that she was struck by how her kids focused not on themselves, but on advocating for their peers. She decided that she needed to follow their lead and run for office to try to improve things for others.
“As a parent, I can’t go home at night and hang out with them without feeling like I need to model that as well,” Reed said. “That’s the bar that they’ve set for me.”
Asked what her top three priorities would be if elected, Reed said she would work on refocusing spending back on students, rather than district leadership; creating community and rebuilding trust; and bringing more accountability to district decisions.
Reed was critical of district spending on contracts that have drawn recent backlash, including for executive leadership coaching and meditation for top district officials. She said that the district needs to prioritize educating students and focus spending on supporting teachers and kids.
When it comes to the district’s fraught negotiations with the city of Mountain View in recent months over sharing revenue from the Shoreline special tax district, Reed said that the district needed to take the money the city was offering with a three-year agreement that was on the table at the time of Reed’s interview with the Voice in early October. The school board subsequently approved the deal at an Oct. 17 meeting. While additional funds would be nice, Reed said that the city isn’t required to give the district any money from the special tax district.
Asked to assess the effectiveness of the district’s superintendent and other leaders, Reed said that she feels there has been a lack of accountability, and that community concerns haven’t been appropriately addressed. When she talked to the superintendent about her discipline concerns last school year, Reed said that she didn’t feel things were handled in a timely manner.
On a Voice questionnaire, Reed said that she opposed the school board’s June decision to give the superintendent a multi-year contract extension and raises. Given that the majority of the board wasn’t running for re-election, Reed said that it didn’t make sense for them to approve the contract, rather than leaving it to the new board.
To address long standing gaps in academic achievement among student groups, Reed wants to provide targeted interventions to support struggling students. This includes bringing more parents and other volunteers into classrooms to help teachers. She also wants to ensure that all campuses have extracurricular activities to engage students after school.
“Having academic support is important, but having those extra enrichment activities is also part of whole-child wellbeing,” Reed said.
Reed was the only candidate on the Voice questionnaire to say she favored a district plan last spring to reduce middle school electives from three to two periods. The proposal got substantial community pushback and was ultimately scrapped.
Reed told the Voice that she originally liked the idea of her kids having three electives in middle school, but then realized that electives in Mountain View Whisman are generally academically focused, not very hands-on and end up adding more homework for students. Reed felt the current offerings didn’t warrant having three elective periods.
While she favored switching to two electives, Reed also said that the district didn’t communicate with parents about the reasons for the proposal, leading them to feel that something was being taken away.
Reed opposes the district’s construction of subsidized housing for teachers. As a teacher herself, she is concerned that receiving housing from your employer blurs the lines between work and home life. The fact that the district is leasing the land is also a concern for Reed.
