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Erin Davis-Hung is running for a seat on the Mountain View Whisman school board with the goal of using her experiences as a parent volunteer and substitute teacher to improve the district as a whole.
Davis-Hung began volunteering more than a decade ago when her daughter was in kindergarten, and became a substitute teacher in the district several years later. She has also served on the PTA boards at Bubb Elementary School and Graham Middle School, and is currently on the Los Altos High School PTSA board. Her younger child currently attends Stevenson Elementary School.
Over the course of her time in Mountain View Whisman, Davis-Hung said she has seen concerning changes in the district, including the gap widening between students coming from affluent versus lower-income families and fewer parents volunteering on campuses as more households have both parents working in demanding jobs.
“I don’t think we can keep going the way that we’ve been going and expect to see much change, because everything else has been changing around us,” Davis-Hung said.
To improve student performance, she wants to give teachers more support to implement differentiated instruction, in which students are taught in a way tailored to their academic level.
She also wants to reduce the number of hoops parents have to jump through to sign up to volunteer. While Davis-Hung said that maintaining security measures is necessary, she added that she had to go through fewer steps to become a substitute teacher than a volunteer.
One of the challenges that the district is facing is that certain schools have large populations of high-achieving students, while students at other schools get left behind, Davis-Hung said. She is interested in looking at redoing attendance boundaries as a potential solution.
Davis-Hung also wants the district to consider increasing the number of aides at schools with more disadvantaged students, like Castro Elementary School, so that students can receive additional support. She’s also in favor of the district’s Reimagining Castro plan, which is an effort to increase support for students and improve academic performance at the elementary school.
Asked how she would address growing levels of chronic absenteeism since the pandemic, Davis-Hung said that she’s interested in having a wider array of electives at the middle school level, so that kids are excited to attend school.
In terms of student mental health, Davis-Hung said that she believes the district needs to hire more than one counselor for each middle school. She also spoke positively about the district’s plans to adopt a social-emotional learning curriculum.
If elected, Davis-Hung said that her top three priorities would be reducing middle school class sizes, increasing fiscal oversight and improving communication with parents.
Mountain View Whisman’s budget has grown in recent years as property tax revenue has increased. When the district had less money, it kept a tighter rein on spending, Davis-Hung said. She wants to see the board take a closer look at its expenses than it has in the recent past.
When it comes to the recent controversy over district spending on contracts for executive leadership coaching, meditation services for district administrators and the services of an external public relations firm, Davis-Hung said her concern isn’t with the services themselves, but rather the costs involved.
“I don’t disagree with it, I just think it’s a lot of money that we’re spending on those things,” Davis-Hung said. “I’d like to see less going to the district office and more to the schools.”
On the topic of Mountain View Whisman’s fraught negotiations in recent months with the city of Mountain View over how to split money from the Shoreline special tax district, Davis-Hung said that while she was disappointed that the city doesn’t want to give the district a greater share of revenue, she believed it should sign the three-year deal that the Mountain View Los Altos High School District had already agreed to.
“I see why the district is trying to push for more, because I wish the city would give us more,” Davis-Hung said. “But at this point, … I just want to see us moving forward, and not keep litigating.”
The school board later approved the three-year agreement at its Oct. 17 meeting, after Davis-Hung spoke with the Voice in September.
Asked about the performance of the school district’s leaders, Davis-Hung said that she feels the superintendent has done a lot of good things, but has also made mistakes, particularly around communication. She noted that parents don’t feel like their concerns are being taken seriously, and said that the district needs to do more work on community building.
On a Voice questionnaire, Davis-Hung didn’t say whether she favored or opposed the school board’s June decision to give the superintendent a multi-year contract extension and raises. Asked to clarify her position, Davis-Hung said that it is difficult to say with certainty, because the current school board members have access to more information than she does. Superintendent evaluations are typically done in closed session.
At the same time, she expressed concern about the length of the contract and suggested that a year-to-year system could have been an alternative. She added that parents have shared pretty valid reasons why they are disappointed in the district and superintendent.
“By extending the contract, I think the school board kind of dismissed their concerns,” Davis-Hung said.
