Election 2026: Tamalpais Union board hopefuls split over trust, budget at forum
Two incumbents and five challengers vying for three Tamalpais Union High School District board seats are divided over whether the board has lost the community’s trust after a year of contested votes on support programs for Black students, cellphones and the district’s alternative schools.
Six of the seven candidates made their cases Sept. 28 at a League of Women Voters of Marin County forum at the Kreps Conference Center in Larkspur, co-hosted by Marin Promise Partnership. Challenger Maria Sandoval, a Mill Valley resident who teaches Spanish at a San Francisco private school and serves on the Marin County Free Library Commission, did not attend. In her League of Women Voters guide answers, she listed rebuilding trust through listening and collaboration as her first priority.
The district runs Redwood High School, the main public high school for Tiburon and Belvedere students, and Tamalpais High School, which serves Strawberry, along with Archie Williams High School in San Anselmo and two alternative schools. Board members are elected districtwide.
Election 2026: Read complete coverage at thearknewspaper.com/election2026
The two incumbents on the ballot, board President Cynthia Roenisch and Kevin Saavedra, cast the race as a question of experience, arguing the district has steadied its finances and raised test scores under Superintendent Courtney Goode and needs seasoned board members through a tightening budget. Most of the challengers said the board must first rebuild trust with students, parents and teachers.
The third seat is open because board member Emily Uhlhorn chose not to seek reelection. She will finish her term and become executive director of the Tam High Foundation in January.
Roenisch, a Corte Madera resident who teaches Advanced Placement English at Alameda High School and is a former litigator, served on the Kentfield School District board before joining the Tam board and led the search that hired Goode. Saavedra, of San Anselmo, described his background as private equity and investment banking; his two children graduated from Sir Francis Drake High, now Archie Williams. He is the only candidate who did not file a statement for the county voter guide.
The moderator, reading from questions submitted by the public, prefaced one by citing “significant discord between the district and the community,” evidenced by contentious board meetings.
“I reject the notion that we have lost the trust of the community,” Saavedra said.
He said the contentious issues had affected “a very, very small number” of the district’s students.
“With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that we made the right decision,” he said. “So I believe that we are acting in the interest of the community. And unfortunately, sometimes people don’t, they’re gonna have to accept no for an answer.”
Challenger Joy Scully Koo, a Mill Valley engineer with an MBA and the parent of three students, opened the evening with the opposite view.
“I’m here because over the last 18 months I’ve watched this board dismiss the very young people it’s meant to serve,” she said. “We need leadership that leads rather than reacts.”
She has twice been elected to the Tamalpais High Site Council, sits on the Mill Valley School District’s Measure G bond oversight committee and co-organizes the Marin Youth Job Fair.
Roenisch said many in the room had come over “one particular issue,” the board’s decision on outside consultants, and that the services they provided are now handled by district staff. She said board members must explain the board’s decisions to the public and should not undermine decisions the majority has made.
“The loss of trust goes two ways,” she said.
A string of divided votes
On June 3, 2025, the board voted 3-2 not to renew $250,000 in contracts with consultants Paul Austin and Tenisha Tate-Austin, who provided mentorship, academic support and counseling for Black students through a program known as the Hub at Tamalpais High. Roenisch, board member Jennifer Holden and Saavedra formed the majority; Uhlhorn and board member Ida Green dissented.
Roenisch argued at the time that the work duplicated the jobs of the district’s assistant principals, deans, teachers and counselors. At the forum she said the services are now led in-house at Tamalpais High by Cathy Flores, senior director of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging for the district.
Koo said students lost a year of support between the end of the contracts and Flores’ arrival in the role.
“They only have four years in school,” she said.
The same three board members outvoted Uhlhorn and Green on April 14 to adopt a bell-to-bell cellphone ban that took effect this school year, locking students’ phones in cases from first period through the end of the day. Last December the board voted 4-1, with Green dissenting, to move Tamiscal High School onto the San Andreas High School campus in Larkspur this year, combining the district’s two alternative schools, a move Roenisch’s ballot statement says saves $1.5 million a year.
Tension between the board and the public has also shown up in public-records requests. Goode told the board Aug. 25 that the district’s legal costs for handling them rose from about $14,000 a year to nearly $76,000 in 2025-26 and could reach about $185,000 this school year if requests keep climbing, the Redwood Bark reported.
Finances good, outlook cloudy
Tam is a so-called basic-aid district, funded mainly by local property taxes rather than per-student state aid, which leaves its budget tied to property-tax growth rather than enrollment.
Roenisch and Saavedra were first elected in 2018, the year the Marin County Office of Education ordered the district to produce a deficit-reduction plan and warned it could be insolvent as early as 2020. Saavedra had been treasurer of that year’s parcel-tax campaign.
Voters in 2020 approved Measure M, renewing the district’s $469 parcel tax through June 2029 with a 3% annual cost-of-living escalator. The tax, now $560 a parcel, is projected to bring in about $18.5 million this year, some 14% of a district budget of about $130 million. In 2024 voters approved Measure B, a $289 million facilities bond, eight months after a $517 million bond narrowly failed.
Enrollment peaked at 5,146 students in 2020-2021 and fell to 4,316 last school year, according to district figures, and is projected to keep declining. Candidates at the forum put this year’s at about 4,200. The board approved $1.37 million in staffing cuts in February 2025 and another $2.2 million early this year to hold reserves at its minimum of 17% of spending, though budget projections presented in March showed reserves dipping to about 15.5% this school year.
“Our district operations and our finances are good with a cloudy outlook,” Saavedra said.
He said only about 6% of California public high school students attend a district funded the way Tam is and warned that the stability the board has built “can be lost very quickly with people who don’t understand how this is working.”
Roenisch said the district is healthy “for now,” has kept its 17% reserve and is hoping property-tax revenue recovers, while Goode and Corbett Elsen, assistant superintendent of business and operations, look for consolidations and efficiencies.
Challenger Brian Sutherland, a Mill Valley appellate and constitutional lawyer with two sons at Tamalpais High, said costs are rising faster than revenue.
“The outlook now is that the balanced budget will last for a couple more years and then it won’t last,” he said.
He said the district will need to renew its parcel tax in the medium term and consider structural changes in the long term, including lobbying Sacramento with other districts.
“We may need more funding from the state. We may need to bring special education in-house. We may need to think about housing solutions,” he said.
The board discussed June 16 whether to put a renewal on the November ballot after a January poll showed support hovering near the two-thirds needed to pass, but took no action before the Aug. 7 deadline.
Valerie Wynn of Mill Valley said contract negotiations with the Tamalpais Federation of Teachers begin next year and that passing a renewal will require a board the community trusts. Wynn said she practiced law for 15 years, including seven at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, before teaching social studies at Archie Williams for nearly a decade until summer 2025.
Former board member Leslie Harlander of Mill Valley, a retired civil engineer and former registered nurse who has lived in Marin for 40 years, said board members should go through the budget “with a fine-toothed comb” rather than rubber-stamp it and should reach out to voters well before they need them.
“We can’t just only do community engagement when we want money,” she said.
The teachers union and the Marin Democratic Party have endorsed Koo, Sutherland and Wynn, and the Marin Women’s Political Action Committee has endorsed Koo and Wynn. A committee called Tam Union Governance Alliance supports the three and opposes Harlander, Saavedra and Roenisch, according to campaign-finance disclosures. Harlander led the field with $16,969.62 in contributions, including a $3,000 loan to her own campaign. Saavedra, Roenisch and Sandoval had no financial filings posted as of Sept. 30.
Experience versus a fresh start
Roenisch, who said she has been a school-board member for 21 years, including her years on the Kentfield board, said she is running because she was asked to and wants to support Goode in only his second year as a superintendent. She said that if the three challengers running together win, the board would have a combined four years of experience.
“And Dr. Goode deserves more, the district deserves more,” she said.
Koo countered in her closing that “experience doesn’t necessarily mean effective.”
“The students and teachers face 2026 challenges and this board has fallen into a fixed mindset that protects the status quo,” she said.
Harlander, who served two terms and was board president in 2020 before stepping down in 2024, placed herself between those positions. She said she decided to run again because of the district’s new leadership, which she said brings fresh eyes and experience.
“But there’s also a little bit of a risk, and it’s sometimes hard on the institution,” she said.
She said a board should mix new and experienced members and that “having left the board and then coming back gives me a new perspective.”
Sutherland said he would push to formalize how the board answers written public comments, which he said often go unanswered, and Wynn and Koo proposed rotating board meetings among school campuses so working parents can attend.
“I think the next trustees should offer humility, absolutely. I think they should offer some audacity as well,” Sutherland said.
Closing the achievement gap
Koo said 87% of white students in the district complete the course sequence required for admission to California’s public universities, compared with 50% of Black students.
“That’s an accountability failure, a systems failure,” she said.
State data match her figures, though the Black cohort is small: of the district’s 2025 graduates, 739 of 852 white students, or about 87%, met the requirements, compared with 10 of 20 Black graduates, according to the California Department of Education.
Roenisch pointed to Goode’s transcript audits, which check that every incoming student is enrolled in courses leading to university eligibility, as well as rising Advanced Placement enrollment and peer tutoring that reaches seventh- and eighth-graders in Marin City. Students passed 91% of the roughly 4,000 AP exams they took in May, and the share of Black students enrolled in AP courses rose from 18% in 2024 to 27%, according to figures presented to the board Aug. 25 and reported by the Redwood Bark. Sutherland said he supports the district’s Black Student Success Team, and Wynn said the board needs test scores broken down by demographic group. Harlander said she would revive elements of the plan drafted by the district’s Racial Justice Task Force.
Saavedra said the district is closing the gap but that its source lies in the Sausalito Marin City School District, the K-8 district serving Sausalito and Marin City, which he said he had urged the prior superintendent to address.
He said that district’s failure “in my opinion is the most racist thing happening in Marin right now,” and that although it is not the high school district’s responsibility, “it is something that we could have a tremendous amount of influence in.”
AI, housing and campus police
Sutherland called for a new task force on artificial intelligence, saying the district’s existing one, which updated the board Jan. 13, delivered an interim report without recommendations before it was disbanded, and that the district has no AI policy. The district does have some rules on AI. Its academic honesty policy, revised June 16, bars students from using AI on schoolwork without a teacher’s approval and requires them to credit it when it is allowed. At a Marin Women’s Political Action Committee candidate forum earlier this month, Sutherland said the AI policy the district has now is not adequate, and Roenisch said she supported restricting AI, the Redwood Bark reported.
Asked about partnerships on housing, Roenisch pointed to the district’s decision not to back the Village at Oak Hill, 135 apartments for school and county employees planned between San Quentin Village and Larkspur Landing. After the project’s financing gap grew to more than $16 million, the county asked Marin school districts to guarantee its rents and occupancy to win a lower bond rate. The district had already declined to participate when the board discussed the request in March 2025.
Roenisch said that “in hindsight that was a very wise decision,” given the district’s finances, and Saavedra agreed.
“We’re in the business of education, not building houses or apartment buildings,” he said.
All six candidates said the district has no school resource officers on its campuses, and none called for bringing them in. Wynn and Harlander said sheriff’s deputies are assigned to each campus. Roenisch said she has seen resource officers work well at Alameda High School, where she teaches.
Ballots go out by Oct. 5. Marin Registrar of Voters Natalie Adona, who spoke at the forum, urged voters returning ballots by mail to send them no later than Oct. 27. Video of the forum is posted at marinlwv.org.
Reach Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652.