Endorsement: Abbey Kerins for San Leandro School Board
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, via School Board President James Aguilar
SAN LEANDRO, CA — Today, I’m thrilled to announce my endorsement of Abbey Kerins for the San Leandro School Board in Trustee Area 2. Abbey is the embodiment of the spirit within San Leandro Unified School District, a think-tank and a school district administrator with vast experience and an unwavering dedication to public education.
Abbey Kerins is a leader with experience.
Abbey has has all of the experience that builds transformative school district leaders: a classroom teacher, a teacher-leader, a school site and school district administrator. She understands school district governance, and all of the complex structures that create public education like the back of her hand. She has very intimately worked with school district funding: establishing herself as a leader in multi-county efforts, working creatively around major budget cuts, partnering with philanthropy, and managing high dollar state and federal grants.
It’s fair to say that Abbey is up to date on the education landscape; having been at the front of research, statutes, and policies, she knows how to break down the most complicated terms, and make them easy for parents and families to understand — to pull people into the dialogue that needs to happen in any given school district.
Abbey has worked in San Leandro Unified before, having served as an Assistant Principal at San Leandro High School. This alone would be an asset to the Board’s governance, adding to the already amazing breadth of school board representation with teachers, parents, and students.
Abbey Kerins is devoted to transformation.
When Abbey applied for the Area 2 vacancy in February, 2022, she laid out a vision for transformation across the school district. She has a vision for working with the Board to empower the district to use career technical education and STEAM as a jumpstart to the careers of the next generation, to make San Leandro Unified the place students can excel regardless of experience in school and life.
Abbey also envisions moving LCAP equity-focused goals, dual language immersion, and extensive community engagement as major areas of focus for the school district. Similarly to me, she wants to bring social justice issues that are often not talked about to the forefront of even the less strenuous of decisions on the Board: the climate crisis, teacher housing, transit.
Abbey Kerins puts students first.
Abbey understands our community as one of local tradition, one representative of a “global world with numerous international businesses around the corner and mom and pop shops that have been passed down for generations.” She knows that “our graduates are leading innovation and carrying on the legacy of families that have been here for decades and those that are brand new to the country.”
This idea of supporting the next generation is something I care about deeply, as a school board member and as a teacher myself. In this vision of our community, she dedicates herself to partnerships with all stakeholders in an effort to capture the best for every student.
Note that Abbey’s campaign is just getting started! I hope you will join me in her kickoff once announced, and get to know her much more in the coming months.
James Aguilar is the School Board President in San Leandro, high school social science teacher, Director for the California School Boards Association, and an alumni of San Francisco State University.
