D65 Meet the Candidate: Chris Van Nostrand

Post 9/11 in a 10 day series on District 65 Candidates for Office

This is a post in a series that will run from March 7 to March 17th where I’ve given District 65 Board Candidates the option to post whatever they want on the blog. I gave them no limitations, except to follow the standard comment section rules and I do no editing, beyond formatting.

If you have questions for the candidates, please also follow the rules on the comment section.

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Thank you, Tom, for the opportunity to post.

And thank you to my fellow candidates for the D65 school board. I've enjoyed getting to know such a talented, committed group of individuals, and I'm proud of the civility, support, and cooperation displayed during this campaign.

It's really been a wonderful experience.

Now is the time to turn our attention toward the future of D65 so that we can build an academic culture in which students of all backgrounds and abilities thrive.

The newly constituted board cannot change the past, nor can it control the daily operations of our schools.

What it can do is establish the vision for D65 as expressed by the community, and then ensure that our finances, policies, and systems support that vision.

And the dominant theme expressed by parents, grandparents, kids, teachers and staff (current and retired), neighbors, journalists, and passive observers: meet every student where they are.

Some will need social and emotional support, while others will want more challenging coursework.

Some will thrive because we provide a warm lunch that allows them to focus on learning.

Others will thrive because we push them to participate in academic competitions.

However, all of them have the opportunity to achieve their potential if we design our entire school district strategically and intentionally.

This strategy will require the D65 board to approach the job like a turnaround.

In that regard, this isn't my first rodeo.

Before I started my own fitness company, I served as a senior marketing executive at several universities during my twenty-year career in education.

In 2013, I was recruited by the University of California, Berkeley, to help solve a problem familiar to D65 residents: how do we create a sustainable financial model for a proud public education entity facing a massive structural deficit? And how do we do so in a way that protects our core academic mission and experience?

Over the next decade, my fellow senior leaders and I applied a few strategies and learned some lessons as we set about charting a new course for a large, complex academic bureaucracy.

Here's how I see them applying to D65.

1. Measure and track everything: School boards have a solemn fiduciary obligation. We must show the impact of every single dollar we spend, particularly as we rebuild trust. This has heightened importance as we consider new funding sources from taxpayers and private institutions.
   
   As Chief Marketing Officer at UC Berkeley, I had to show a return on investment for the ~$2m annual budget I managed while complying with state laws.
   

2. Set audacious goals: As a community, we must look to the future and define the education we want to provide. A budget deficit is no reason to shrink from the opportunity.
   
   Part of our success at UC Berkeley was that the entire senior leadership team would set ambitious plans, such as doubling revenue, even amidst crises. That made us more open-minded to opportunities in new areas, such as online degrees that were previously out of our purview.

3. Get the basics right: Achieving big goals isn't always about chasing innovation or the next new thing. In fact, a lot of the time, it's about doing the small things right consistently over a long period. What could we do in a decade if we recommitted ourselves to effective classroom management policies and aimed to improve student academic performance by 1% every week?
   

4. Allow for periods of divergent thinking: The board ultimately acts as a unit that must find consensus amongst competing viewpoints and priorities within the community it represents.
   
   But when faced with major decisions, it's worth first promoting creative solutions, particularly when they come from an engaged, talented populace.
   

   In D65, have we considered alternative models for school consolidation? Is now the time to launch a city-wide early childhood education program that keeps more money in the district while heading off achievement gaps?
   

   Can we offer K-8 schools to provide more of the neighborhood experience people want?
   

   This is how, at UC Berkeley, we came upon the idea for our most popular program, in which mid-career executives from across the world came to campus for a semester-long entrepreneurship program.

5. Relationships always matter: Our most successful programs at UC Berkeley were predicated on partnerships at all levels. I anticipate doing the same on D65, specifically focusing on D202 and city leaders.
   
   Since my colleagues and I were university administrators, we depended upon faculty or other academic leads as the subject matter experts. We needed them to actually envision and deliver new modes of content or delivery.
   

   Meanwhile, a mix of union and non-union workers made our programs work, whether it was issuing student visas or feeding and housing them.

   
   I also spent lots of time looking for new people to connect with whom we had mutual interests, even if there was no apparent reason to work together at that moment. That included state legislators and presidents of other colleges.
   

   These relationships often led to fantastic developments years later - as when we built the first ever online degree in health policy and law between two different universities.

Ultimately, Evanston is a robust, dynamic city with plenty of resources and assets. I'm looking forward to putting both of those to use to once again make D65 an education destination.