BY STEPHANIE LAM
Daily Post Correspondent
A parent and long-time school volunteer who wants to push for increasing pay for teachers and bring back a failed parcel tax is running for a seat on the Palo Alto School Board.
Linda Henigin, 56, on Friday officially joined the race to replace incumbents Shounak Dharap and Shana Segal. Residents Avery Wang and John Craig have both said they plan to run but have not turned in their completed forms to run, according to the Santa Clara County Elections Office’s list of candidates.
Henigin said she is in favor of paying teachers “as much as we can.” Last month, the Palo Alto’s teachers union reached a contract deal with the Palo Alto Unified School District that calls for a 5% salary increase for the academic year that just ended, a 5.4% increase for the coming year and two $5,000 cash bonuses.
Depleted reserves
Because of the new labor contracts, the district’s $104.1 million in reserves will be depleted to $24.8 million by the end of next school year. Henigin said the school shouldn’t be “hoarding money for (money’s) sake.”
If elected, she wants to bring a parcel tax back for voters next spring. Voters rejected an earlier version of it in June. Henigin said she would help campaign by giving the public a clear explanation as to why the schools need the funds.
“We need to build trust with our community and be really clear about what it would be spent on, and why it’s necessary,” Henigin said.
The tax would have raised $14.5 million, and be used to help fund teacher’s paychecks and local programs.
Her bio
Henigin received a master’s degree from Bank Street College of Education in New York and taught elementary school in New Jersey from 2003 to 2007, according to her social media.
Henigin has a middle school and high school student in the district and works as an aide at Duveneck Elementary School.
Henigin is also a board member for Pathwise (formerly DreamCatchers), a nonprofit that offers free after-school programs to middle school students.
Henigin is on a nominating committee at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto and the executive board of the Palo Alto Council of PTAs, according to their websites.
Henigin has pushed the city to allow denser housing. She is involved with Indivisible Palo Alto Plus, a group that has marched for immigrant rights and against President Trump.
We can’t pay the teachers enough! I hope they put the parcel tax back on the ballot and double the amount to $1,600! Remember … children are our future!
Just paying a lot is hardly an educational strategy. PAUSD has 20% fewer students than 10 years ago, but higher staffing and premium wages. With huge deficits, they’ll now need to right size staffing. Henigin seems to have no clue what is happening.
I feel that this comment is disingenuous. While teacher pay has increased in recent years, it is still far below the current median income for residents of Palo Alto. We should push for our teachers to actually live in the community that they work for, and we should push for competitive wages to actually make that happen.
Paying a lot isn’t by itself the educational strategy, it’s pushing for an investment in children’s education by offering competitive wages to teachers so they can actually live in the city and commute easily to their work. It’s a tradeoff where we get to continue to have a high achieving school district. Also the school district doesn’t have “high deficits” as you might claim. It’s not in any sort of hardcore budgetary crisis (I don’t fault you though, the budget is notoriously difficult to understand), what’s happening currently is that, depending on if the parcel tax is renewed next year and depending on what the property tax revenue growth ends up being, there might (emphasis on might) need to end up being a slight trimming of district expenses in order to prevent a loss of autonomy of the district to the county.
This is wrong on a couple of counts. First, the idea that teacher pay is related to median income of the town makes no sense. Good teachers can live where they like, and how they like – if the current pay attracts and keeps them, we are in good shape. Second, yes, there are indeed big deficts, based on the new employee contracts. Expected loss is $15m last year and ~$50m next. The district will almost certainly be issuing layoff notices come March 15 next year. Maybe it will be “slight,” but per the budget and contracts it could be over 10% of current staff. Running through nearly $100m in reserves in a year is no mean feat.
It’s not like you’re going to attract the best teachers who ever lived to Palo Alto with these huge raises, you’re just paying the same teachers a whole lot more. I guess the idea is that they’ll try a lot harder than they’re already trying or something like that. Beats me.
Wouldn’t that be lovely! Teachers definitely deserve more. So without putting more taxes, how do we do that? Lower expense SOMEWHERE somehow. Fewer teachers. Fewer admin. Fewer police-fire. Or rationalize the police-fire compensation. Pensions for almost all public ‘servants’ are high. Somewhere along the way has to consider living within their budgets. Dont keep going for higher taxes.
Enrollment is decreasing. In future years we won’t need as many teachers. I would have like to have heard her strategy for dealing with declining enrollment. I don’t listen to every school board meeting, but I haven’t heard that addressed in the meetings I’ve heard. Declining enrollment was a difficult problem in the 1990s and it led to some bad decisions — like permanently selling off school property that should have been retained and used when enrollment increased in the 2000s. I would encourage Henigin and the other candidates to have some specific ideas to discuss with voters.
Census data shows that about half of school-age children in Palo Alto don’t attend PAUSD schools. The latest round of teacher union demands followed by school board capitulation doesn’t result in better educated youth. It merely makes PAUSD a better place for middle-class employment. Teachers have unmatched job security and better pensions than most workers. But the children get no benefit from these expensive perks. Many parents are concerned enough to put their kids in private schools, where outcomes are better. Henigin seems to have been recruited by the teacher unions or educational establishment given her desire not to rock the boat and raise the pay of already well-paid teachers. I’d like to support a candidate whose goal is to improve instruction and raise test scores.
“Census data shows that about half of school-age children in Palo Alto don’t attend PAUSD schools.”
It does? Which data are you referring to? I just looked up the 2024 ACS data, and eyeballing the numbers for Palo Alto it is nowhere near half.
When I’ve broken this down in detail in the past I have found that if you look at the numbers for PAUSD (not Palo Alto) you see a huge number of young people enrolled in private school. These numbers are heavily influenced by the fact that PAUSD’s boundaries includes the Stanford campus, and Stanford has a lot of students. Sadly the breakdown I figured out how to do was unable to differentiate between young folks who had graduated from high school versus those who had not.
You’re right about the number of kids. The population of children 18 and under is about 15,000 and the PAUSD enrollment is around 10,000. But you didn’t address my main point — How do higher teacher salaries result in better outcomes for students?
Why do we need higher teacher pay? Are we having trouble filling the few openings for teachers that we have? Makes no sense.
Henigan could very well win simply because nobody else wants to be on the school board since its basically a volunteer position. Unfortunately you can’t vote to leave the position empty. Maybe you can write in “Anybody else.”