By Darla Lawson
During this election, five candidates are vying for four open seats on the Albany Unified School District Board of Education. The candidates are Becky Hopwood, Josh Mahoney, Melissa Boyd, David McKinney, and Margaret Allen. Hopwood, Mahoney and Boyd are incumbent trustees up for reelection. Allen and McKinney are new candidates. Each candidate shared their own reasons for running and what they want to express to voters. Hopwood says, “The responsibility of the school board in general is to represent the voice and vision of the community.” The election is on November 3, and Albany High School students can vote for school board candidates if they are over 16 years old.
Becky Hopwood, who is running for reelection after being elected in 2022, says that her goal is to have more people be aware of a new measure, Measure V, which allows 16 and 17-year-olds in Albany to vote on city council and school board elections.
Hopwood says she came from the United Kingdom 24 years ago for her husband to go to UC Berkeley and decided to stay because, “we loved it so much,” and because of the community. After spending a couple of years here, “we got really involved here.” Hopwood also shares her life outside of school board, and says, “I used to be a registered nurse and midwife.”
Hopwood says that during her time as trustee on the school board, she worked to get this measure passed. She says, “I was tasked as a school board member to figure out whether it was feasible financially, and also try and get it implemented.”
Hopwood highlights her appreciation of the Albany Unified Schools, saying, “I have three kids who all went through AUSD schools from kindergarten through 12th grade,” and says she chose to run for school board after her twins graduated in 2022. “I had such an appreciation for everything that they had, all of the opportunities they had in Albany public schools.”
Josh Mahoney is currently the president of the school board and has been on the board for a little over two years. Mahoney says, “My priorities are finances, facilities, equity, and achievement. And I think I’ve had some impact on those latter two.”
Mahoney says that one of his top priorities is growth in academics: “One in four kids in Albany is not a standard for reading, and one in three kids are not a standard for math. And in a community like Albany, I always joke, people didn’t really move to Albany for the nightlife. They moved here for families in schools.”
He adds, “We’ve started to make some really good progress in reading. Particularly with our historically marginalized groups, which is not something we’ve been able to see in probably the 10 years prior to me getting on the board. So I’m really excited about that progress.”
Mahoney was a former math teacher and says, “I think math is a little bit of an unsung hero. I’d like to see us start making the progress that we started to make in reading, and make those in math.” Outside of his work as a trustee, Mahoney has two kids who both went to Albany schools K-12.
He shares, “I’m a big foodie, so I love to cook and cook very often. I currently have a broken toe, but otherwise, I’m usually an avid runner and run 30 to 35 miles a week. And I grew up in Chicago, so I still have some loyalty to my Chicago sports teams, like the White Sox.”
Melissa Boyd is also running for reelection. Boyd first ran in 2020. She says, “I was focused on equity concerns; it was back in 2020, so we were dealing with the pandemic and realizing how many differences there were across homes and families with what students had access to, but it just felt extremely important to me, and I wanted to be one of the voices that was helping make those decisions.”
Boyd says that being a school board trustee means listening to all kinds of voices and points of view, “listening to all those different groups of people and all those different needs and all the knowledge that they bring and factoring all that in when we make decisions.”
Boyd says, “[What] I focus on the most is still equity.” She also says she is focusing on, “largely around looking at the way that students perform and the various metrics, both in academic, standardized test sort of evaluations, and also in the ways that we’re able to see how students feel on campus, like their sense of belonging, the sense that they feel welcome.”
Other than being a school board trustee, Boyd says that she is “an attorney, coach, and professional development advisor” in San Francisco. She has lived in Albany for the past 13 years. Boyd has two daughters who have gone through the Albany school system and are currently students at Albany High School.
David McKinney is a new candidate for school board trustee. After being a teacher and now an education researcher, McKinney was drawn to running for school board and says he “found education to be compelling. I think it’s one of the most important things that we do for our society. It’s this amazing free public education for everyone. And I’ve always been attracted to it.”
McKinney says, in regards to his daughter who is currently a student in the district, that though the schools in Albany were good, that was not his family’s highest priority when coming to Albany. “As a former teacher, I believe that you can find a good school anywhere.”
McKinney says that, if elected, he thinks it’s important to ensure that everyone feels that they belong. McKinney says that the district is already focusing on ensuring people feel that they belong and says, “that’s the thing that I feel very strongly about my background,” including, “student motivation, and students having a sense of belonging both in their school and for the subjects that they’re learning.” He also says, “It’s really important that we spend our money wisely; we don’t have a gigantic budget. So we need to make sure that when we do spend money, it’s wisely and for things that will benefit as many students as possible.”
The last candidate, Margaret Allen, is also a new candidate for trustee. Allen has lived in Albany for about seven years, after moving from the Midwest. Allen says she was drawn to run for school board trustee because she wanted to be involved and use her financial background to help Albany “settle, get the budget back on track and get us out of a deficit so that we can really focus where we’re spending our dollars for the kids and for the teachers.”
Allen explains that the school board’s job is communicating well with the community, “making sure that when the budget is set, we’re spending on the appropriate dollars, we’re investing in the right areas” and “being thoughtful about what we’re asking of the community.”
Allen has three main goals, if elected as a trustee. Her first is financial stability: “Making sure that we have a long-term plan for turning our budget back into a surplus, and really feeling comfortable with the amount of money we have, especially with the loss of funds from the Golden Gate Fields closing.”
Her second goal is “Listening to our educators and our community, what their goals are for the schools and so that any decisions made by the board are really representative of the people that elected us.”
The third is: “Equity across all of our campuses. We have amazing elementary schools, amazing high school, middle school, as well as our preschool, and all of them deserve the right amount of effort and energy to make sure that the students are set up for success.”
Allen was drawn to Albany because of its urban feel, along with its “small town environment, and that really perfect mix of being able to walk down the street and run into people you know.” She also loves Albany because of “all the amazing school systems that we have; it just was a really perfect fit, and we were really happy here.” Allen has two kids, one at Ocean View and one at Albany Children’s Center.
