I got the same flyer and had the same reaction. Glancing at this it looks like Kathy Jordan has received the endorsements of these 3 newspapers. In fact the Weekly criticized her temperament including hundreds of emails and requests for emails. The Daily Post far from endorsing her ran a long story about how she sent multiple emails to Paly students on the school newspaper that left them feeling stalked!

I also received a piece of mail from Stacey Ashlund that had quotes from the Weekly and the Post that were obviously designed to look like endorsements, even though Dauber and Dharap were the two endorsed.

Is this a new trend in campaign fake news? I hope the Weekly does a story about these deceptions. Otherwise they will work because people aren't necessary paying close attention.

Why is Kathy running a campaign on all the items Ken has been a success on? Look at this flyer:

Budget? - Ken pointed out the idiocy of multi year contracts.

Dump the troubled Super? - Ummm Ken pushed that.

Sexual Assault and Title IX issues? - Join the party! Ken has been standing up for students for years on this issue.


I don’t get it. Is Kathy running against Barb Mitchell? Or is she confused on what her opponent has achieved?

If she is looking for change on the board, why would she point out the things her opponent has successfully changed? Is she confused?

And this is a candidate running on her supposed honesty and integrity? I get that candidates want endorsements. News flash: if you don't get it don't try to fool people.

Can someone post Ashlund's ad? In the meantime there are 4 other candidates that are being honest with the public. I am going to vote for one of them.

As someone who defended Dauber and campaigned for him, I just want to remind people that he faced many of the same criticisms as Jordan is facing now.

I don’t disagree that you make a good argument about the flyer, however, you are assuming that local voters would be that shallow as to have their vote decided by a flyer. It looks to me like Jordan was trying to get people to read the history and make up their own minds. A lot of people don’t follow the troubles in the schools, and don’t know where to start. This appears to me to be a way to get people to read those stories.

Calm down, people. You come across as stooping to snear tactics. I’m undecided - this is backfiring on me.

I do wish Caswell had had the decency to step down so we could vote in three of what is the best slate of candidates in years.

I don't know if Kathy is confused or not. What I can see is that she is trying to scare people who don't follow the schools into voting for her with old headlines + deceptive ads. She is having success in the Chinese community especially among people who rely on WeChat for their news. That is giving her a lot of money to pump out this "fake news" as someone called it.

Completely agree with this: "I do wish Caswell had had the decency to step down so we could vote in three of what is the best slate of candidates in years."

School Board is a tough vote this year!

I've known Kathy for over a decade and she will stand up to Ken Dauber [portion removed.] However, she doesn't have the political skills for this position. When her temper flares, it's extreme and irrational. Playing tennis in singles is different than having to get along with others.

I would vote for Kathy over Dauber, who already had his chance and is quite arrogant.

Dharap's beliefs are the same as Dauber but more polished and polite.

Ashlund? I don't know if she is tough enough. And she has a history of helping specialized groups, not the majority. We need to help all students, not just those with special needs.

The Paly newspaper, The Campanile, recommends Ashlund and Dharap: Web Link However, Ashlund supported Project Safety Net (guards at the tracks) which was the biggest waste of money, so what kind of judgement does she have?

"I've known Kathy for over a decade and she will stand up to Ken Dauber, who bullies."

What evidence do you have that Dauber "bullies"? He's endorsed by all of the other board members besides Caswell.

And Project Safety Net is a waste of money, along with track guards? OK, I can see where you're coming from.

I don't know Kathy personally and have never played tennis with her so I don't have your expert opinion. I do think that running a deceptive mail campaign and trying to fool the community is a bad sign for the school board.

"Dauber, who already had his chance and is quite arrogant"

Yes, he's had his chance and what did he get done? 1) Finally resolved OCR nightmare; 2) Voted against catastrophic 3 year teacher contract; 3) Pushed out the incompetent McGee and helped clean out the dreadful district office leadership; 4) brought sanity to the conduct of board meetings, which now actually follow normal procedures and even end on time (or sometimes early!); 5) Stopped the ridiculous false choice between "mental health" and "academic achievement," arguing that we all need, want, and can have both for our children.

Look at the Daily Post endorsement - even Dave Price said Dauber is a model board member and he was wrong not to endorse him 4 years ago.

So yes, with a track record like that, I'm certainly happy to give him another four years.

"The deception seemed obvious: The flier was meant to imply that all three newspapers had endorsed Ms. Jordan. In fact, both the Weekly and the Post have endorsed Shounak Dharap and Ken Dauber for School Board ... . The Mercury News ... has not made an endorsement."

Three Pinocchios in just one ad. [Portion removed.]

Community gadfly who left high school journalism students feeling harassed and fearful sends deceptive mailer! Who exactly is surprised by this? I've never seen a candidate more obviously unsuited for the job.

Why does anyone care about this? She's in the same league as the other guy with the fake nonprofit.

The WeChat post is true. Kathy Jordan's supporters are all over WeChat posting many things supporting her and saying bad things about the schools and Ken Dauber. They call her KJ and him KD. Many of them are untrue but people who disagree are bullied. I will not vote for her but I will also not post on WeChat about the election because it is poison. I am not surprised about the paper ad.

Posted by Palo Altan, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood

>> Ashlund? I don't know if she is tough enough. And she has a history of helping specialized groups, not the majority. We need to help all students, not just those with special needs. [...] Ashlund supported Project Safety Net (guards at the tracks) which was the biggest waste of money, so what kind of judgement does she have?

You just made Ashlund sound better.

Dauber has done a tremendous job fixing the mess at 25 Churchill Avenue. I'm certainly hopeful that he will be the top vote-getter. I'm still making my mind up: Dharap, Ashlund, or Scharf.

Ashlund also gave us some misleading advertising in the email I got this morning - a pull-out quote from the Weekly saying "Ashlund ... is the best alternative."

She failed to mention they were saying she was the best alternative *after* the two people who they were actually endorsing! The full quote is, "Of the remaining candidates [i.e., after Dauber and Dharap], Ashlund ... is the best alternative."

Really, people feel they need to stoop that low just to elected to school board?

Again, still undecided. But I do wish people would calm down and remember that people are not campaigning on big national budgets, everything comes from pretty low-level grassroots efforts.

There is an ad for Jordan in the Monday Daily News that looks almost the same as above, except that above the newspaper logos, in LARGE capital letters it says:

"RECENT PAUSD NEWS:"

Clearly, the intent was to direct people to get themselves up to speed by reading the articles mentioned in the news outlets mentioned. You would have to be looking for trouble -- or looking to make the person look bad -- to assume the worst.

Since the ad was in Monday's paper, and would have had to be submitted before that, this was obviously the intent, well before your post. I'm guessing someone helping thought the words were superfluous and though they were making it better by taking them out for the flyer. Or they used an old file. I've had similar experiences that have created messes for me to clean up afterwards, too.

For the record, I'm still undecided on this race. Many good candidates, for different reasons. As I said, dearly wish Caswell had the decency to step down and let us have a third person from these worthy candidates.

I do not know Cathy Jordan, but I will say that the same things were said about Dauber four years ago, the Daily Post even apologized for it in their endorsement of him. I think the difference is that men get a pass for being passionate and having to rock the boat where women do not. Dauber's wife got much similar criticism -- when she started the recall of the judge, people criticized her with oddly similar criticisms as are being leveled against Jordan. (Essentially, the woman is being "hysterical".)

I think organizations benefit from people who are driven to do the right thing even at a cost to themselves. I much prefer that to someone who is always, cool, calm, and "civil", and unable to be a real upstander when push comes to shove.

I'm still undecided. If you want to sway my vote, tell me something of substance and stop with the unsubstantiated inuendo.

I'm astonished to hear from Resident that Stacey Ashlund continues to send out emails that selectively edit newspaper quotations to create the impression that she was endorsed when she was not. That to me is disqualifying for a school board candidate. We need to trust them when we can't see them, and this indicates that Ashlund isn't being honest even when in full view.

To me is an easy case even apart from the flyer. I went back and read the Weekly editorial, here is what it said:

"As much as we share some of Jordan's complaints about the past failures of Paly and district administrators who handled these matters, her tactics do not suggest she has the temperament to work effectively with other board members or the new district administration. She has sent hundreds of repetitive and demanding emails to the board, administrators and the media and made unreasonably broad requests for years of emails between district employees.

Her criticisms of the current board are also misplaced. The board took all the right steps to investigate and remove or discipline the staff members who made mistakes, as described above."

Dubious honesty combined with poor boundaries with staff and students and judgment issues adds up to a No vote from me.

@Maggie,

As a parent with personal experience of how the district can stonewall and avoid fulfilling even the most straightforward records requests, retaliate against parents just for asking for records that might make them have to do something they don't want to do (like comply with the law), and especially -- and this is key here -- exaggerate the amount of tasks or communications they deal with from people they don't want to deal with, I do not see this as a negative from Jordan. Our district is supposed to have procedures in place in order to make satisfying records requests as easy as possible, they cannot legally use the excuse that it's too hard if they don't have such procedures, and ours doesn't.

In fact, if someone made an OCR complaint about that, I'd be happy to come in after and provide evidence of persistent illegal avoiding fulfilling records requests that had a negative impact on a student and was retaliatory in nature, and that hasn't been addressed or fixed just because of the admin musical chair.

We've heard the story that everything was going to be better because of staff turnover before. It's just not enough. I see no evidence of contrition, truth and reconcilation, procedures or the will to investigate and make right the wrongs of retaliation, or even procedures for improving compliance with ordinary records requests. I see no evidence that the district culture has changed. I'm guessing Jordan could have made way fewer requests if our didn't simply didn't stonewall and if it did have the procedures the law requires. (I do think Jordan should have complained to the OCR about lack of procedures instead of continuing to file the requests, but then, she has a child in school and there is no protection against certain retaliation.)

I am frankly concerned that if we DON'T elect someone like Kathy Jordan, then everyone on the board will go back to the CYA [email protected]'t-stink-no-matter-where-we-fling-it attitude of previous administrations. There seems to be this attitude that they just need to work through this one problem and THEN they can pretend that there are no problems. It's destructive and leads right back into the messes. Jordan seems to be the only hope that there is someone willing to deal with the tough stuff in a way that focuses on the rights and protection of students and their families.

Did you mean Stacie Ashlund in your first paragraph? I am personally concerned about Stacie being another PTA leadership type no better than Heidi, but I do know her and can tell you unequivocally that she is an honest person. I think she is probably angling for higher office, and would vote for her in a heartbeak again, say, Berman, but I'm not convinced she would be what we need on school board.

Still undecided.

Jordan has apparently submitted requests for [portion removed] thousands of pages of documents [portion removed.] That is way beyond a reasonable request. Even if you don't mind a deceptive flyer, she clearly has an ax to grind with some employees, including our high school principals. Putting someone on the school board to settle scores is not why I'm looking for.

Please quote your source for money related to public records requests.
The weekly sends a request in every month that comes in around 1000 pages. You still seem to read that paper.

@Samuel, the Weekly, per your tally, requests about 12K pages a year in order to keep the entire community informed.

At one point I read that Jordan had requested 800K pages (literally years worth of emails from various mid-level employees), which seemed to be focused on her personal witch hunts against members of the Paly staff.

The first seems responsible and helpful; the second scary and way over the top.

Samuel L wants a citation for Kathy Jordan's public record act requests. Here are some:

Mentions A SINGLE REQUEST for more than 300,000 pages: Web Link I don't know why the Weekly struck "hundreds of thousands" from my post because this reporting is from the Weekly.

The school district's public records request page has dozens of requests from Kathy Jordan: Web Link By my math there's nearly a million pages of outstanding requests from her plus many "abandoned" requests adding up to hundreds of thousands of additional pages.

To comply with privacy laws, each of those outstanding pages needs to be examined by a human (not to mention the public dollars already spent on doing searches for dozens of requests). Let's posit conservatively $1.00 a page to pay for some to strike out content. Heck, let's be ludicrous and say it costs 50 cents a page, which would mean that someone paid $30 an hour could get through a page a minute for eight hours a day. We're still talking about half a million dollars. A million or more is a more reasonable number.

So that means that Kathy Jordan, who wants to be on the school board, thinks it is a good use of public dollars to spend that kind of money on a fishing expedition through the district files to pursue her grievances. What kind of decisions will she make when she can vote on the budget, not just file public record requests?

PAUSD Mom, you stated that it was costing a million dollars. I asked where you got that number. You don't have any verification for any numbers. In the same manner, your latest math is also made up. How do you know how much it costs to redact documents? Go look at one of the requests, and see how much is redacted.

Given the district's history of withholding information, to the point that they have been trained to not document sensitive information so that it is not discovered by these public records requests, I say let's see what's out there. If the district actually practiced transparency, there wouldn't be a need to make any requests.

Samuel L., if you want a school board member who wants our school district to produce and redact a million pages of documents to satisfy the curiosity of one person, please feel free to vote for her. I won't.

I notice that while Jordan's flyer features prominently the logos of newspapers that haven't endorsed her, it doesn't mention her prolific public records act requests. Or her fight with the Campanile students. I imagine she has a pretty good idea what will get votes and what won't.

Voting only for Stacey Ashlund and Shounak Dharap.

They are the only two candidates who I feel would be successful at the job.

During the last few years and with all of the problems PAUSD has had, I cannot vote for Dauber nor Jordan. They seem to be part of the problem.

Reminds me why I'm not voting for Kathy. It was terrible having her at Duveneck PTA meetings. She would make the same blanket condemnations that she is now doing to the school board. I think she's sincere but just can't handle the reality that she not always right and the rest of the world isn't always wrong.

Thank you John Jacobs for reminding us of the many reasons NOT to vote for Kathy Jordan.
Seems like we all have specific episodes to recount that clarify why Kathy Jordan is NOT qualified to serve on the school board. My "favorite" is her bullying of Paly Campanile student editors with accusations of libel [portion removed.] The school district engaged a lawyer to protect the students. Before you dare vote for kathy read all about it here:
Web Link
or here:
Web Link

There are truly qualified and caring candidates available on the ballot.

Thank you, @PAUSD Mom, you have convinced me to VOTE FOR Kathy Jordan.

My experience with the district is persistent exaggeration of the nature of records requests and how burdensome they are -- even grossly lying about how much parents or others communicate, how difficult it is to deal with communications when they create the processes for some obstructive purpose, etc.

The reality is that they produce large records requests on computer disks, which isn't that expensive. Even if some need redaction, many whole classes of records just don't. The justification for paying a six-figure salary to a communications person was in large part to handle records requests, but that was never done. I personally experienced difficulty just getting answers to policy from the district or copies of reports the district gives to the board every year, because they didn't want to be responsible for doing the right thing if the information were public.

There are laws around records requests, and the district as a public agency can't just be lazy (or obstructionist) to avoid having processes that make satisfying records requests possible without major cost or drama. Our district uses recordkeeping tools that cost a lot of money that tout how easy they make providing certain kinds of information. But our district continues to claim it can't provide that kind of information, even though it's public what tools they use and those vendors advertise what they do.

The fact that @PAUSD Mom is making it seem like someone has to physically walk around and find documents one by one to redact them and put them on a copy machine, or that somehow it was reasonable for the district to provide NONE of so many of the records requests Jordan made, makes me realize that we needs someone on the board who knows what is still broken.

Even Dauber doesn't understand the records request problem, and how our district regularly flaunts the law even when it comes to student records when their behavior hurts the student's future. Having experienced the illegal behavior, district people not answering straightforward educational record requests and then writing official letters falsely claiming they had, and also not fulfilling requests and then saying they will only if you file another request (because it would make them look bad for failing to comply with the law the first time) but then failing to comply with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, when its a STUDENT record, and not seeing that situation get any better, I am inclined to believe Jordan on this one. Teachers should care about this, too, because of how Diorio got slammed for just going along with administrators, and then she was held to account for the ways the district wasn't complying with the law. There are still enough unresolved things that need dealing with rather than building up again and then the dam breaking, and Jordan seems to be the only one willing to keep trying.

Many of us elected Dauber because he was willing to stand up despite being vilified very similarly to how Jordan is being vilified. Dauber now thinks he has to defend the progress by ignoring the remaining problems, but he's still effective in many ways, so I'm probably going to vote for him. But I think we needs at least one person willing to rock the boat about things that are still not being addressed, including that our district's processes for and attitude toward doing their job with records, especially when someone has a right to fix something the district is doing wrong, are still terrible and often unlawful.

I will vote for Dauber and Jordan.

I have even witnessed situations in which the only explanation was that an administrator was keeping certain records in certain people's situations at their home. Dauber is too convinced that everything is all fixed, and doesn't realize that the nature of a school district is that there will be problems to solve. We will never get to a state of perfection, only of healthy stasis, where we have good and positive FAMILY-FOCUSED ways of solving problems (rather than spending lots of time and money trying to cover them up). I still think Dauber is probably the most likely to behave ethically if confronted with one of the remaining skeletons in the closet, but I also think Jordan is the most likely to act in the best interests of families even if it riles the go-along-get-along crowd.

OK, Dauber and Jordan. I had been on the fence.

Old Paly Dad,

Ah, the Campanile issue resurfaces, a crafty bit of misreporting of its misreporting.

1st. The story that Campy published, about the freshman assaulted in the Paly bathroom by the senior-Paly athlete-turned-convicted-rapist, is textbook libel.

The students got the story wrong because it said its source, Paly Principal Kim Diorio, told the reporters that it was consensual, "facts" that Diorio and staff were broadcasting widely and without support according to PAUSD's independent investigators.

So Campy unwittingly published a reputation-ruining falsehood about a female Paly student.

2nd. After Jordan pointed out the mistake, the journalism teacher and Principal Diorio were required to make it a teachable moment and correct it. Web Link

Instead, they dug in and let students repeat it a few more times.

3rd. We live in America. America has the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment allows citizens like Jordan to write to public agencies informing them of their mistakes and ask for a correction.

4th. So Jordan emailed "contact" emails that Campy published on its website, pointing out the error.

5th. Jordan was asked to stop writing.

6th. She stopped.

7th. Then, of the blue as campaign season started heating up, a Paly journalism teacher abandons district protocols and proper communications channels and goes on the attack against PAUSD parent Jordan in Palo Alto Daily Post's reader comments, based on "facts" that even the Campy students refuted.

8th. A week later the Campanile, the student publication that that teacher runs, finally issued the public a retraction and the young girl an apology for misreporting the original story but placed that next to a hit piece against Jordan for having the audacity to bring the problem to its attention in the first place.

Go figure.

As for lawyers being called in, the lawyer's advice should have been straight forward: Don't send the letter and lay off Jordan. If you don't, real legal troubles, yours, might begin for violating Jordan's 1st Amendment rights.

The "letter" Jordan received wasn't written by the lawyer. It wasn't written by the President of the School Board. It wasn't written by the Superintendent, the Paly Principal, or even the journalism teacher.

It was written by Janice Chen, their underling, who appears wasn't happy being used for this and quickly left PAUSD for the same job at Monta Vista High, undoubtedly a kinder high school.

[Portion removed.]

Oops you left out the parts about how Jordan demanded to meet with students without adults present, texted students without their permission, and refused to stop emailing them unless they agreed to do exactly what she demanded. The truth seems to be that she has an obsession with everyone connected with this case, including a hit list of people to be fired including both of our high school principals.

Does she have a First Amendment right to run for the school board to settle scores? Yes. Should anyone want that on the school board? No.

@Paly Parent,
If you want to engage in conspiracy theories, there is a lot more evidence of backbiting and scheming in the district culture and staff.

Jordan would not be the first parent to be attacked viciously for trying to do the right thing when the district was in the wrong. The Go-along-get-along crowd are so bereft of any sense of doing the right thing that they actively undermine anyone who does.

I don't think there is any evidence that Jordan is trying to do anything except right a wrong amid being smeared for standing up in a way that needed doing and few had the courage to do. We need that kind of courage on the school board, the last 10-15 years should have taught us that. (Dauber was smeared very similarly and now both papers endorse him.)

Jordan didn't make friends in a few of Paly's tight knit circles after she called for Kim Diorio to be fired because the Federal government's multi-year investigation uncovered that Diorio violated Title IX when she did absolutely NOTHING for the 3 years that Paly girls were, repeatedly, sexually harassed by the young male principal.

For that reason -- speaking truth to power and stopping Paly staff from using trusting teens to spread fake news in school newspapers -- I am voting for Kathy Jordan.

Kathy Jordan have full support of Chinese voter bloc in Palo Alto. She care about needs of Chinese students and supports programs to help them succeed.

Palo Alto residents from China are all being urged to vote for Kathy Jordan. She have our back.

@Yuang
Are you saying that we should select school board members according to ethnic divides and that candidates should be aligned with Chinese interests rather than the interests of all students, regardless of ethnicity? Do you really want our community to become divided along ethnic lines? Is that what Kathy Jordan represents for you?
My Chinese friends support the needs of all students and American values of equal opportunity for all. We have far too much of this sort of division coming from the White House. Those are not the values that I think Palo Alto believes in.

[Post removed.]