BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto school board candidate Rowena Chiu says she’s become “rather infamous” for taking on Superintendent Don Austin.
“It is no secret that certain groups of parents and students and teachers have felt disenfranchised, and I hope that with a different makeup of the board, there would be an opportunity to look again at culture and transparency and communication,” Chiu said in an interview last week.
Chiu said that she, “as a woman of color who drives consensus,” has a different management style than Austin, who is more aggressive.
“I hope that we could come to a compromise,” said Chiu, one of five candidates running for three open spots on the board.
Chiu, 50, was PTA president at Ohlone Elementary School when Austin’s administration closed Room 19, a special education classroom that served eight families.
The class was moved to Nixon Elementary School so that students could be in more age-appropriate groups, Austin said in May 2023.
“This has been a recommendation before my arrival. Many have questioned why it took so long,” Austin said.
But parents wanted to stay at Ohlone and were upset that the district made the decision without their input.
Chiu joined them, protesting in front of the campus and eventually submitting a case to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
With help from Stanford Law School students, Chiu and five families argued that Ohlone is a “choice school,” where students are enrolled through a lottery and learn on a farm.
It’s a violation of civil rights when a distinct kind of education is only available to neurotypical kids, Chiu said.
Chiu said she’s fighting not only for the families who were moved around, but for future families who can’t attend Ohlone.
The case is still at the Office of Civil Rights, with no timeline for a decision being made, Chiu said.
Chiu has worked at the World Bank, the BBC and the Bay Citizen, a now-defunct nonprofit news outlet.
Chiu has four kids in the district — two at Ohlone Elementary School, one at JLS Middle School and her oldest at Middle College, an alternative high school program on the Foothill College campus.
Chiu has a history of activism on a global stage through the #MeToo movement.
She wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2019 about Harvey Weinstein grooming her, attempting to rape her, and then pressuring her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Chiu talked about the decades of silent grief that followed and the decision to finally come forward.
Chiu said she is now transitioning from an advocate to an administrator on the school board, if she gets elected.
“Professionally, I understand that sometimes when you’re administrating something very complex, there are huge amounts of restrictions — bylaws, laws, policies — that one has to abide by,” Chiu said. “You have to work within a very limited range of what change that you can make. But that doesn’t mean to I don’t hold to certain principles that I feel driven by.”