Milpitas: Three candidates vying for one temporary school board seat

MILPITAS — After a routine appointment to a temporary school board seat went awry, residents cried foul and called for a special election. Now, Milpitas voters are set to pick from one of three candidates to fill the seat during the March 3 primary election.

Ling Kong, Minh Ngo, and Vance Vuong are vying for the seat vacated in July by Daniel Bobay, when he moved out of state.

The person elected would serve through the end of Bobay’s remaining term on the Milpitas Unified School District Board of Education, which ends Dec. 4, 2020, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar, and the same seat would be up for election again during the November general election.

Kong, a technical lead at Intel and mother of two kids in the school district, says her expertise in foreseeing problems and finding solutions, as well as her history as an engaged parent will serve the district well.

Ngo, a division supervision manager at Bank of America Merryl Lynch and father of three young kids, one currently attending school in the district, said he is a critical thinker who pays attention to the details, and his project management experience means he’ll be a good fit to help the district see major initiatives through.

Vuong did not respond to a voicemail and email seeking an interview for this story.

The election cost the school district $113,000 to place on the March 3 ballot, and comes after months of controversy over an appointment process the school board used to try and fill the seat.

In August, the board chose from 17 candidates and appointed Ngo to the seat over Kong, after choosing them as the top two candidates.

However, after the board interviewed the two at the Aug. 13 meeting, Superintendent Cheryl Jordan incorrectly represented the results of a scoring and ranking system the board used to help determine who should get the seat, suggesting that Ngo was a board favorite when Kong actually had more “top choice” votes.

During the same meeting, board vice president Hon Lien later changed her scoring, and board president Chris Norwood announced he would change his vote from supporting Kong to Ngo, breaking a tie and awarding Ngo the seat.

Ngo was taken off the board in October when members of the community groups, Better Milpitas and South Bay Eco Citizens, both of whom support Kong, filed a successful petition for a special election with the county registrar.

Kong is an organizer of the Eco Citizens group, which was formed several years ago to combat odor issues in the city, but Kong said she had no hand in organizing the petition for a special election.

Kong, 43, said if elected, she would work to ensure the district is focused on maximizing its funding opportunities from many sources, including developers.

“We need leadership who is willing to think out of the box, not just resort to what is minimal, we really want to do what is optimal for our students,” she said.

Kong said she met with board members and Jordan in August 2018 to show them research she had collected on how other school districts, such as neighboring Fremont, had employed strategies to negotiate more aggressively with developers.

She also said she wants to improve the district’s long-term planning and strategy to boost the amount of matching funds the district can receive from the state to help stretch taxpayers’ bond dollars further.

Kong also said the special election campaign has “been extremely filled with negative campaigning against me,” and there have been “a lot of smear campaigns on me,” including from Mayor Rich Tran.

Tran has been posting on his mayoral Facebook page that Kong is a bad choice for the seat because she previously supported smaller trash cans in the city, which were part of a new garbage collection contract deal the city council approved and voters later affirmed in a ballot measure.

Kong said the attacks have been unfair and misleading, and have nothing to do with her qualifications to be a school board member.

Ngo, 38, said in the short term, if elected, he would like to establish a new policy on how to fill vacant seats on the board, to avoid the confusion and controversy in the most recent appointment.

“I am working on a proposal to the board for succession plans that will be a bit more streamlined,” he said. The plan would have the board look to its existing PTA council and community board advisory committee members for potential appointees.

“It really deals with just the order of transparency and the order in which the board conducts itself from start to finish, there is a process to follow and address any situations that might come out of it,” he said.

Ngo also said if elected, he would want the board to focus more on advertising the school district’s services and needs to both new and existing parents and families, to help attract enrollment and potential investment from large companies that employ local parents.

“Our community has shifted to more of an Asian-American population in Milpitas,” Ngo said. “There is a big ask for Mandarin and Vietnamese language immersion programs.”

If elected, he said he’d want to work to create those language programs, and study the results of the Spanish dual-language immersion program already in place at Randall Elementary to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Both candidates said if they were elected to the temporary seat, they would seek re-election for the four-year seat in the general election.