By Anne Gelhaus
While five candidates are vying for three seats on the board in one area of the West Valley-Mission Community College District, the incumbent in another area is running unopposed this November.
In Trustee Area 3, which covers the Campbell Union High School District, incumbents Phil Stokes and Joy Atkins are running for re-election. Challenging them for the three at-large seats are Norm Abrahams, Chris Constantin (who didn't return requests for interviews) and Frank Jewett.
Karin Dowdy, the third incumbent in that trustee area, is leaving the board to run for the 22nd District Assembly seat.
There is no contest for Brian Sloan's Trustee Area 2 seat, which means he'll still be the Santa Clara Unified High School District's representative to the board after the Nov. 5 elections.
Sloan says he thinks the high cost of making one's name known in the district might prevent some potential candidates from filing. Candidates who wanted a statement printed in the sample ballots going out to the more than 200,000 registered voters in the district had to pay $2,180 for the privilege.
Sloan, a controller for a courier company, was first elected to the board in 1992. He has an associate degree in liberal studies from Mission College and has studied early childhood education at West Valley College. He also served as a student trustee to the board.
"I learned lots of the inner workings of the board, except for the closed-session stuff," he says. "Now I guess I'm the business resource on the board."
Sloan, along with Dowdy and Assemblyman Jim Cuneen, is backing Jewett in his bid for a Trustee Area 3 seat. Jewett, a banker, says he could be another business resource for the district, in that he would foster ties with local corporations and try to establish endowment funds for Mission and West Valley colleges.
"I want to be a trustee who's known as an ambassador," Jewett adds. "We need to look at where we're going to be [financially] three, five and seven years out."
Jewett says he would consider serving on the board an extension of his community service work. He currently serves on San Jose's Community Development Block Grant Commission, the San Jose Medical Center Charitable Foundation and the board for NextDoor/Solutions to Domestic Violence.
Jewett favors term limits for school board trustees.
"After you've served for two terms," he says, "it's time for other people to get involved."
Ironically, incumbent Phil Stokes, who was first elected in 1983, says he was approached to run 13 years ago by trustees who wanted fresh faces on the board.
"They said they wanted someone who knew and valued education," says Stokes, an English teacher at De Anza College in Cupertino.
The district has made due with flat funding levels from the state for the last three years, but these monies are due to increase in the current fiscal year. If he's re-elected, Stokes says he's looking forward to putting the increased funding to good use.
"State funding is much better this year," he adds. "We have additional money for deferred maintenance and high tech. This will allow us to catch up.
"We don't have a computer on every faculty member's desk yet," Stokes continues. "That's one of our goals."
Stokes says he hopes the additional funds will also allow for overdue raises for faculty and staff.
"It's a lot more comfortable having to decide where you're going to spend instead of where you're going to cut," he adds.
Challenger Abrahams, who served on the board of trustees from 1983-92, questions some of the cuts that have been made.
"One thing I'm really interested in is finding out the real reason why the journalism program [at West Valley] was discontinued when so many people in the community said they wanted to keep it," Abrahams says.
Another thing Abrahams wants to keep an eye on is a 6.5-acre parcel on the Mission College campus, which was recently leased to real-estate developers. During his previous tenure on the board, Abrahams helped create the foundation that eventually worked out this lease agreement. A portion of the revenues generated will go toward completing the construction of the Mission campus.
"Since I was in on the beginning, I want to make sure that the funds are used the way they're mandated to be," Abrahams says. "We have to set up appropriate bookkeeping procedures to monitor these funds."
Incumbent Atkins agrees that overseeing this new revenue stream will be of primary concern to the board.
"Our first priority is to finish Mission but also to make sure that the aging West Valley campus has its needs met," Atkins says. "To balance the needs of the two campuses is the main objective."
Like Area 2 trustee Sloan, Atkins has seen the cost of putting her name on the ballot skyrocket during her time on the board.
"When I first ran in '88," she remembers, "the cost of a ballot statement was under $400."
In this race, Atkins thinks she'll get name recognition as an incumbent, but she also believes she has another advantage over the other candidates.
"I sort of like the fact that I'm the only woman on the ballot this time," she says.
In other races, incumbents Jill Hunter and Cindy Ruby are running unopposed for their seats on the Saratoga Union School District board, the two incumbents on the Los Gatos-Saratoga High School District board, Renée Patton and Robert Dunnett, are vacating their seats. Four candidates have filed to fill their shoes: Lynne Bauer, Cassandra Huston, Jackie Schmidt-Posner and Lorrie Wernick.
Shari Kaplan contributed to this report.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, August 28, 1996.
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