Claudia Rossi is no different than her fellow Morgan Hill Unified School Board member trustees.
She attends those sometimes rather long school board meetings twice a month on Tuesday nights, commenting on agenda items and voting on policies.
But being a board trustee is not all about attending the bi-monthly meetings. If you’ve ever wondered what a school board member does outside of those meetings, Rossi is a good example.
Rossi, 44, a former nurse and now a stay-at-home mom with two children in the school system – Jeffrey, 12 and Sofia, 9, both at Nordstrom Elementary – fills her days with meetings, visiting school sites and planning for different programs.
“I’m just doing my little part,” she said.
She dedicates she said, at least one hour every morning to studying – research on upcoming agenda items or reading up on what other districts are doing for certain policies, such as the recent board study session on A-G requirements. Then, it’s off to meetings.
This past Tuesday alone, for example, by 11 a.m. Rossi met with the Lori Escobar Youth Center (formerly the El Toro Youth Center) director Alban Diaz, Mayor Steve Tate and Woman of the Year Loritta Bonfante Johnson at Mamma Mia’s to discuss outreach opportunities.
By 12:30 p.m. Rossi was sitting at a school desk in room 103 at Live Oak High School’s Interact Club meeting, making an announcement for an upcoming mentorship program she wants to start at the Morgan Hill Outdoor Sports Center to the club of 25 or so students.
“There are seven school board members … our name is on the ballot. So it is an elected position which technically means I run for you. You guys are my bosses,” she said to the club on Tuesday.
With a donation from Leadership Morgan Hill, the program would be an after-school activity bringing middle school students to play flag football at the sports center, coached by older high school students.
“The beauty of this program is you have students from Britton that join the program. That student enters Live Oak as a freshman, he sees across the yard a mentor that he met on the field. They already have that connection,” she said.
Right after her meeting with Interact Club, she was off to meet with the Extreme Learning Center, seeing if she could work out a deal where they would offer their services for algebra classes to incoming high school students over the summer to better prepare them.
This past October, Rossi helped start the program that she said she is the most proud of – the “No Excuses Conference” part of Project Roadmap under the Morgan Hill Community Foundation. The conference informed about 80 first-generation potentially college-bound middle and high school students and their parents that college is a reachable goal. Part of the plan, Rossi said, was to make that conference not just a one-time event, but “try to keep the momentum going” to prepare them for college.
“What happens to the parents who don’t even know what the SAT is?,” she said.
With Extreme Learning, they worked out a deal to offer some high school students SAT prep classes, three Saturday classes for four hours each, with no cost to the students. She also continues outreach to those students and their parents one Saturday a month.
Currently, Rossi is also working on bringing Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Salinas) to Central High School at the end of March. She heard him speak in Gilroy, talking about his life story and struggles with school and thinks he can serve as an inspiration to Morgan Hill students who have had difficulty in school.
Being one of the school board members with children currently in the district’s school system (trustee Bob Benevento has two high school-age daughters at Sobrato), she thinks she’s more approachable to parents because she too is a mother.
“It’s a little bit difficult to walk through campus sometimes, because moms approach me about everything under the sun,” she said, laughing.
She joked that her daughter Sofia doesn’t want to go grocery shopping with her anymore because Rossi constantly gets approached by people who recognize her as a school board trustee.
Fellow trustee Benevento says that Claudia is “a breath of fresh air” on the school board.
“She offers insight and a perspective that many of us do not have,” he said. “Claudia comes in to every meeting with questions, never afraid to express her opinion.”
The upside to having kids in the system however, besides relating to some policies the board discusses, is having things on her radar that normally wouldn’t be. The issue of cyber bullying, for example, she said she wouldn’t have even thought of if it weren’t for her kids.
There is a downside however, to being in the public eye. Besides those that approach Rossi with complaints or suggestions about what the district can do, there are those that take the opportunity to give them a piece of their mind. The No F policy that the board discussed back in August, which questioned if students that received a failing grade in a class could still participate in afterschool activities, caused a stir in the community.
“I was at a restaurant and this person literally took their finger to my face and said, ‘You believe in coddling students. It’s because of you and people like you that students are coming to our schools and taking remedial courses and we don’t have the money for that,’ … I was absolutely mortified,” she said.
Now in her second year, she’s learned to navigate the system. Her bi-lingualism in Spanish has also come in handy.
“I once was an English learner. So what I did in my first year, was to help inform the Spanish speaking families in navigating the school system. And that continues to be my goal,” she said.
Even with all her accomplished programs she’s working on and others that she’s completed, she believes that “every single board member is fully engaged in their work that they do.”
“So its not that I’m doing anything more than my board members, I am in places where there is more visibility,” she said.
She’s also still learning she said, about how to become a better board trustee and serve the district.
“The difference between year one and year two is that I have people helping me through this journey,” Rossi said. “My concern always is supporting the district in the implementation of our curriculum, that addresses the needs of all students.”
