Patch Blog: Why Blumenfeld has My Vote

My kids’ education is my #1 issue and the primary reason my wife Jackie and I moved to LCF. After much consideration, Jackie, a teacher at San Marino High School, and I have decided to support for.

I first met AJ in 2009, just before I became President of the La Canada Flintridge Educational Foundation. We worked together on Measure LC, and I was impressed with his technological acumen, his commitment, and his passion for education, even while still a . Still, I admit I raised an eyebrow when I learned he was running for School Board, due to his youth and his student status.  Over time, though, my concerns have been completely assuaged, and I am convinced AJ deserves our support.

• AJ thinks big.  While we all want to be #1, he does not obsess over adding 9 points to our API so we can congratulate ourselves on an objective number.  Rather, at the candidates’ forum, he said (paraphrasing), “Let’s get to where we can say ‘forget the rankings’ and focus on making our kids’ education truly great!” This means ensuring that through more meaningful teacher evaluation and review, every classroom has an outstanding teacher in it. Having a great teacher should be a guarantee for LCF students; it should not depend on the luck of the draw. Further, AJ is a profound thinker. While many politicians’ platforms are a mile wide and an inch deep, you can drill down into any educational topic with AJ, and he has thoroughly researched it and carefully considered how it impacts education in La Cañada.

• AJ understands students’ needs, because he so recently was one of them.  While I favor having school board members who have children currently in the system and will enthusiastically vote for my friend and fellow-parent Ellen Multari as well, AJ represents an absolutely unique opportunity for our children (who cannot vote but depend on us to vote their hopes and dreams) to have someone on the School Board who knows exactly what it is like to be the end-recipient of the excellent education we must provide our children.  AJ recalls what it was like to have some outstanding, and some not-so-outstanding, teachers, and he wants the current generation of students to have all outstanding teachers.

• AJ is passionate, committed, and accessible. Though he’ll be at Princeton for 13 months of his four year term, he has vowed that he will be in La Cañada for all school board meetings, will return during all school breaks, and he can be reached at all other times by phone and other modern forms of communication. It is a fallacy to suggest the School Board will suffer if he completes his education. The current board members do not all attend every monthly meeting, and they are not required to attend events locally in between meetings. In fact, it is unlawful for them to meet and discuss business other than at regular school board meetings. 

I would be delighted to see one of LCHS’s most brilliant recent graduates take a leadership role in joining the school board. He will add big thinking, first-hand knowledge of student needs, and passion to the board. This is why I encourage everyone to vote for him on Tuesday.