Palo Alto school board candidate profile: Ingrid Campos

Ingrid Campos

BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer

Palo Alto school board candidate Ingrid Campos says she wants to represent Chinese parents who don’t like to confront authority and Muslim parents who don’t want their children in sex education.

“It’s really important that parents know that they can say no,” she said in an interview with the Post.
Some teachers are going on political rants during and teaching books that are racist and revise history, Campos said.

She took a closer look at what her two children were learning during the pandemic, when she could listen to their classes on Zoom. An eighth-grade German teacher, Claudia Schroeppel, was going on hour-long political rants instead of teaching the language, Campos said, so she went to the principal with her concerns.

Campos also took issue with a social studies book called “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You,” which she said was an inaccurate telling of history. The book replaced lessons about George Washington, and she had her daughter opt out of reading it, Campos said.

These examples are not district-wide policy, but they come up in individual classes or departments, Campos said. She said she would be an ally for parents who want a bigger say in what their kids are taught at school.

Campos said she isn’t a controversial candidate, but her views are different from the other candidates: incumbent Shounak Dharap, teacher Shana Segal and lawyer Nicole Chiu-Wang. They are competing for two seats on the five-member board.

For one, Campos is very critical of how the district handled Covid. Kids were at a low risk of catching the disease, but decisions were “extremely politically charged” and students were set back in their development, she said.

“I told (Superintendent) Don Austin: When you’re at your time, and you’re communing with your maker, you’re going to look back on this time and say how dumb it really was,” she said.

Campos said Scholastic shouldn’t be allowed to sell books in schools because the company is a monopoly and a “deviant publisher.” She wrote a post on her website about Scholastic having 59 books that show up for 3- to 5-year-olds when you search “LGBTQ” on the website.

“What parent desires to expose their child to the deviant lifestyle that embodies LGBTQ?” Campos wrote. “Our children do not need to know about these choices at 3-5 years old.”

For example, she showed the book “Llama Glamarama,” which is about a flamboyant llama who loves to dance but is afraid other llamas won’t approve of his ways.

Campos is the only Republican in the race, but she said that shouldn’t matter because school boards are not partisan.

Campos is a businesswoman who has worked on start-ups and used to own a marble and granite business in Redwood City. She was on the Los Altos Hills Parks and Recreation Committee and moved to the Ventura neighborhood in 2020.

Campos said her business experience would be a strength, because the Palo Alto Unified School District is like a giant corporation with a lot of money coming in and out.

“I find that to be super interesting and right up my alley,” she said.

On the campaign trail, Campos said she has talked to a lot of immigrants, including people from India, China, Latin America, who come from cultures where it’s looked down upon to confront authority. Muslim parents told her that they are against any kind of sex education, she said.

6 Comments

    • You are wrong. We need a different voice rather than usual all progressive Democrats on every elected seat. She doesn’t speak for immigrants, she speaks for the many parents who are now homeschooling their children.

  1. Finally!!! A candidate who talks about the harms of Covid policies to children and LGBTq/Marxist/CRT indoctrination in K-12 schools. My favorite of all:

    “I told (Superintendent) Don Austin: When you’re at your time, and you’re communing with your maker, you’re going to look back on this time and say how dumb it really was,” she said.

    Austin could have been a hero by invoking home rule, rallying the board and parents, disregarding anti-science county, state, and CDC guidelines in favor of liberty and freedom, but he preferred the path of least resistance and went along with the nonsense like a coward.

  2. I’m voting for Ingrid. Enough with PAUSD pushing CRT and gender ideology, queer theory, intersectionality, and not teaching reading, writing and math.

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