Since moving to College Station in 2015, I have served in roles such as President, Treasurer and Fundraising Chair in PTOs at four schools; served as President and Treasurer of the citywide PTO; served as an officer on Booster clubs; been a member of the Education Foundation Board; served on district committees including a Bond Committee, Long Range Planning Committee, and Campus Improvement Committee; and attended Leadership CSISD, where I first learned about board service. These are all things I participated in prior to being elected as a board trustee.

I am in my third year (first term) of serving on the CSISD Board as a Trustee, including serving as Vice President and now as the current President of the Board. I feel honored to be able to serve the community and district and thankful to have learned an incredible amount during my first term.

Church volunteer (have helped with VBS, taught elementary Sunday School, etc)

To share a little about my background, I am a mom of three who is passionate about volunteerism. I’ve always had a love of math and numbers and the details of how processes work. After earning a BBA and MS in accounting from A&M, I worked in accounting for a public company, then taught middle school math at Title 1 schools. Since that time, I have raised my kids and have actively served in schools, nonprofits and church, in particular in places where I was working with school-age children. I think that I bring a combination of passion for students and value for education along with an understanding of financial systems to my role as a trustee.

A Texas school board is a governance board, and our most important responsibilities are helping the district set goals and priorities and following up to see how they are being met; adopting legal policies; hiring and evaluating the superintendent; approving the district budget and tax rates; and representing our community, both by being a voice of the community and a voice to the community. That is the “what” that we do, but there is also an important “why”. As CSISD’s vision is student success, the most important thing we can do as a board is to support district priorities and staff in ways that promote student success.

When asked a question like this, I start by saying I believe the biggest impact on student success in a district comes from the staff who work with those students every day. The work that I’ve done on the board can’t come close to what is happening each day in our schools. However, students and staff need organizational and financial structures in place to help them be successful, and that is the level the board works at. While we are considering goals and priorities and budgets and policies, we are most successful as a governing body when the motivation behind each of these is how it will impact students. We can contribute to student success by making it our priority in all we do.

One of CSISD’s biggest strengths is its people. We live in a community that cares about and supports education. We have families that entrust their students to us and are active in their schools. We have students who are successful in many different areas, both academic and extracurricular. And we have incredible people working in our district. I believe all these things are true, and as a board trustee I want to promote all of us as a community working together. We all live here and have a vested interest in having the best possible education system not just for our students but for the next generation of them too. We won’t always agree on the way to do everything, but we should remain committed to the idea of community working together. If we do that, we will be in the best position for our district to meet the challenges now and in the future and stay rooted in the history we have of being a community that cares about education.

One of the biggest challenges right now for Texas districts is balancing budgets with current levels of funding. While our state economy thrives, the majority of school districts are struggling to find ways to cope with the high inflation of the last several years when state funding has remained stagnant with little increase. One of the things this affects is districts’ ability to recruit and retain teachers and staff, which is another of the big challenges we face. How do we support current teachers and encourage the next generation of young people to want to be teachers? Balancing budgets while still managing to increase pay to support teachers and staff is a challenge that must be addressed. Our district and community need to work together to promote the many positive opportunities we have for students while also advocating for school funding and constantly working to find ways to responsibly balance our budget.