LGUSD school board member Glickman joins Assembly race
By Jeff Kearns
School board member Steve Glickman, a Los Gatan and a Democrat, announced last week that he'll be making a bid for the 24th District Assembly seat in 2000.
Glickman was elected to the Los Gatos Union School District board in 1990, less than two years after he moved to the town from Southern California. He kept his seat in 1994, when he ran unopposed, and was re-elected again in 1998, taking the highest percentage of votes out of the five-candidate field.
Glickman, 54, works as a software consultant, and although he's not currently active on the faculty, he teaches nuclear medicine at UCSF. In addition to his paid gigs, Glickman has volunteered for the last seven years teaching computer skills to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at Fisher Middle School for one hour each school morning.
As a district official, Glickman says, it's his way of staying close to the students in the schools--but for himself, it's also something he wishes he could do for every student in the state, and would like to push for in Sacramento. "The students I teach have been able to learn the fundamentals of how computers work, and if they can do that, I think every student in California can do it," he says. "It's important that they do because that's where the future is."
It's also Glickman's past. After earning his Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University in 1972, Glickman went on to teach courses on medical physics at UCLA, until he heeded the call of Silicon Valley and moved north to Los Gatos with his sons in 1988. Glickman is a single dad with two children, Trevor, 22, and Jason, 19.
Glickman has done the bulk of his work as a software consultant specializing in developing drivers for medical imaging software, and he worked on the team of engineers that developed the first commercial CAT scan in this country in the late '70s and early '80s. He also testified in 1993 as an expert witness in an intellectual property suit filed by Apple Computer against Microsoft.
The candidate also served on the county Juvenile Justice Commission from 1994 to 1997, and has served on the county Committee on School District Organization since 1997.
Now, Glickman says, he's trying to round up campaign contributions and endorsements. Meanwhile, he's financing the early days of his campaign with a loan from himself.
Glickman, who will be competing for the Democratic nomination against Saratogan Rebecca Cohn, says he wants to focus on the same quality-of-life issues--like education, housing and transportation--that his two Republican opponents, Los Gatos Town Councilman Steve Blanton and Monte Sereno City Councilwoman Suzanne Jackson, say they're going to push.
One thing Glickman probably won't find in common with his Republican challengers, however, is his stance on the justice system, which he says needs reform.
"We have too many people in prison for substance abuse, and we should really be treating that from a medical point of view," he says. "Those spaces in our prisons should be used to get people off the streets who are really, truly a danger to society, not those who are a danger to themselves. For most people, if their child had an eating disorder, they wouldn't want the child incarcerated."
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
