BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto school board candidate Alison Kamhi says she’s all about the safety of children. It’s what she does for her day job as an attorney for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, and it’s how she got involved with the school district broadly, getting involved in gun safety.
On the school board, Kamhi wants to invest in mental health and special needs services and to address bullying. “When I think about bullying, I think about adults too … It’s all about setting expectations,” Kamhi said in an interview. “We set expectations that come from the school, from the community, from our elected leaders, about how we want our kids and families to behave.”
Kamhi also wants to look at a district-wide policy for banning cellphones in classrooms. This would help so teachers don’t have to act as police officers, taking away from their teaching, she said.
Kamhi, 43, is one of five candidates running for three open spots on the board.
She’s on the board for Palo Alto Community Child Care, a nonprofit that runs after-school programs at 11 elementary schools. She’s also the co-chair of gun violence prevention for the Palo Alto Council of PTAs.
At Back to School Night, Kamhi handed out fliers about storing guns safely, and she helped write a blurb for principals to read about preventing gun violence.
Some parents said they thought that no one in Palo Alto owns a gun, while other parents said they regularly take their kids hunting, Kamhi said.
Kamhi is from Tennessee, where a lot of people have guns, and said she fully believes in the right to ownership. But she wants to make sure people have information to store their guns safely, with ammunition kept separate.
On the board, Kamhi said she would “institutionalize that community education,” so information regularly goes out about safe storage of guns.
Kamhi also wants to make sure the district is clear in its communication — whether it’s about math advancement, reading curriculum, after school programs, Ethnic Studies or where special needs students are located.
The average parent should understand why decisions are being made, when they can weigh in and what the options are for reversing a decision, she said.
“Withholding information creates a lot of the problems we’re talking about, creates this mistrust and suspicion,” Kamhi said.
Kamhi said she has experience with transparency. She wrote a manual on the Freedom of Information Act, which she’s used as an attorney to get information from the federal government about the immigrant children who she’s represented in court.
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