• Office: Board of Trustees
• Election Date: November 8, 2022
• Candidate: Marie Hurabiell
• Due Date: Monday, August 29, 2022
• Printable Version

Thank you for seeking GrowSF's endorsement for the November 8, 2022 general election! GrowSF believes in a growing, beautiful, vibrant, healthy, safe, and prosperous city via common sense solutions and effective government.

The GrowSF endorsement committee will review all completed questionnaires and seek consensus on which candidates best align with our vision for San Francisco and have the expertise to enact meaningful policy changes.

We ask that you please complete this questionnaire by Monday, August 29, 2022 so we have enough time to adequately review and discuss your answers.

• Vision
  • Short-form questions
  • Education
  • Budget
  • Instruction
  • Long-form questions
  • General
  • Instruction and Curriculum
  • Budget
• Policy
• Personal
• Thank you

Vision

GrowSF believes in a growing, beautiful, vibrant, healthy, safe, and prosperous San Francisco. And we believe that great public schools are necessary for a great and prosperous society.

This section of our questionnaire seeks to help us gain an understanding of your alignment with our vision for San Francisco.

Short-form questions

Please mark the box that best aligns with your position. You may explain any position if you so desire, but this section is designed to be a quick overview of your view of the city's problems and what solutions you might propose.

Education

In general, is it too hard, just right, or too easy to…	Too hard	Just right	Too easy
Enroll in City College	x
Hire good teachers		x
Fire bad teachers	x

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

I have personally tried to enroll in CCSF in the past and found it to be extremely difficult, recently my daughter tried to enroll and the website is clunky, the enrollment software is generally impossible to navigate - it's been this way for years and needs a total overhaul.

Budget

In general, is City College budgeting too much, just enough, or too little on…	Too much	Just Enough	Enough, but badly	Too little
Facilities			x
Extracurricular activities			x
Teacher salaries			x
Administrative salaries	x
Support for students like tutoring, scholarships, career counseling, etc			x
Classes which count toward degrees				x
Classes or programs which don't count toward degrees			x

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Why is City College facing a budget crisis? Please provide a short answer here, and a longer answer in the "Long-form questions" section.

Fiscal mismanagement.

Instruction

Tell us about the quality of education available at City College, and what should be done to improve it, if needed.

Excellent quality of instruction - caring teachers who really make a difference in student's lives.

Tell us one thing you think needs to change about City College that the average voter wouldn't know about.

Top-heavy, needs a re-org.

Long-form questions

General

In what ways is City College succeeding?

• For years, City College (CCSF) has provided many enriching and demanding classes at a cost that has been beyond reasonable.

• The STEM subjects, arguably amongst the most important for transfer and career readiness, are in good supply. For example, CCSF offers 34 mathematics courses, from Pre Algebra with Basic Mathematics to Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.

• CCSF has 62 programs/departments. That's more than USF has on schedule.

• CCSF's student body is diverse, racially, culturally, economically, and in many other ways.

• CCSF provides a great education, students matriculate to really good schools including Berkeley, UCLA, U San Diego

• High acceptance to top UCs - higher than most High Schools- the people using it are really succeeding

• Still open for business is good - after attack on accreditation and all of the other massive disasters, it's still standing

In what ways is City College failing?

• The budget isn't solvent due to mismanagement. And an additional parcel tax wouldn't address this root problem of active mismanagement - it will only lead the administration to believe that they can continue on this path and taxpayers will just continue to bail them out and allow the negligence to continue.

• There's an ongoing labor dispute due to, guess what, fiscal mismanagement.

• CCSF stood to lose accreditation July 31, 2014. A decade ago, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges made 14 recommendations for improvement. The majority of recommendations are unaddressed.

• In late 2021 the Accrediting body placed CCSF on "Enhanced Monitoring" for its continued failures of management and oversight

• Despite $845M in bond funds, CCSF facilities are falling into disrepair

• As people retire they haven't hired appropriate facilities people, there is currently ONE electrician for entire CCSF - ALL campuses - (if a professor requests a new lightbulb when one burns out in office, she must currently wait over a month to get a replacement, if she asks procurement for a lightbulb so she can just change it herself, she is told she's not allowed to put it in bc she is not a member of the union.

• There is currently only one carpenter,

• the buildings look terrible - the shallow end of the swimming pool looks like it has a pothole

• More insane mismanagement: CCSF Paid ppl for 2 years of sitting home - they should have been furloughed like everyone else in a govt job -they would have then been paid by Fed gov. Instead CCSF paid. And then paid out many of those same people a lump sum for their vacation time.

• Horrible registration system - so cumbersome, counterintuitive, difficult, confusing.

• An example: Say you want to add a class - go into your account & request an add… teacher doesn't get a notice - the professor has to go thru every class to see if anyone wants to add, find someone, manually approve - then the student has to accept the approval (!), the student gets NO NOTICE - and has only 24 HOURS -if they don't happen to see it, then it expires and the process starts again

  • Hugely discouraging to ppl to going to ccsf

  • Constant glitches

  • Processes up top are not streamlined - eg vaccination card…

• Enrollment is very significantly down and was down pre-pandemic - this is NOT caused by pandemic, although it is WORSE due to the pandemic. Why is enrollment down?

  • With a labor shortage, many students are being hired without training and are learning on the job - they don't need to go to school, they can work, get paid and learn there

  • Aren't as many lower income families who need to send their kids to CCSF and prestigious Universities are offering scholarships to families that would have otherwise sought to save money with 2 years at CCSF

Instruction and Curriculum

What can the Community College Board do to improve student performance at City College?

• Student performance is pretty good when kids are on campus - the last two years of virtual school was a problem, but being back on campus the teachers can be a lot more proactive and helpful.

• Looking at all of the issues noted above - there are some really obvious fixes (eg, a much better registration system) - if the Board advocates and makes those items a priority they can make it happen (again the first priority however needs to be financial stability).

Are students graduating with the skills necessary to obtain a good job? Why or why not?

Many students move on to a 4 year institution, so for a large segment of the student body this question does not directly apply. For those who are there to get relevant skills/ vocational training/ enhancement, the outcomes are largely positive. Most students I have spoken with are extremely pleased with the faculty and quality of education at CCSF.

What is the City College curriculum lacking which the Community College Board could rectify?

The curriculum is actually very solid, there is nothing glaringly lacking from the curriculum. If anything enrollment should be audited and where there are duplicate classes all with meager attendance, they should be consolidated.

Budget

Why is City College facing a budget crisis? Please explain the nature of this budget crisis.

Rampant mismanagement for over 10 years, multiple recent years of deficit spending, giving the administration a 10% raise while CCSF operated at a 26% loss. The people charged with overseeing this $250M complex academic institution for the last 10 + years have zero experience in doing so - and so have gone along failing to rectify issues identified by auditors and issues that experienced board members would have raised.

What hard choices must City College make to fix its budget crisis?

• Cut bloated administration

• Restructure academic, workforce development, and community programs.

• Create closer alignment with state funding policy without forgoing community aspect of community college (e.g. ESL classes, programs for the elderly, etc.)

• Put in the hard work to question everything, go back to the basics and rebuild as demand dictates

• Prioritize state workforce needs and online community class programs

• Create a facilities plan that will maximize revenue options for current CCSF-owned properties

• Regular monitoring of both revenues and expenditures

• Dedicated fiscal staff to monitor and analyze budgets, cash flow, enrollment, and attendance to flag concerning trends immediately and allow the institution to pivot

What courses or programs should City College cut to improve its budget situation?

There might be a need to temporarily suspend classes with excessively small enrollment, but in the long run this should not be necessary after the organization is restructured.

What new revenue streams might City College tap into to address its budget crisis?

Corporate and community support. I don't believe CCSF has tapped relationships with local businesses that could lead to mutually beneficial projects, eg: local company funds curriculum development and a Professor to teach a class and in exchange is able to hire better prepared students to entry level positions.

Policy

Now that we know where you align and differ from our vision for San Francisco, we'd like to get some details about how you intend to use your elected office to achieve your goals.

Why are you running for Community College Board?

I'm passionate about the transformative power of education and when I learned of how dramatically CCSF has been failing for the past decade + I wanted to bring my depth of experience to bear on shoring up this extremely important city asset.

What is your #1 policy goal?

Restructure CCSF to maximize income opportunities and bring spending within budget.

How will you build the coalition and political capital to enact your #1 goal?

Since I will likely be the only Trustee with any experience overseeing a successful world-class university, I have better models to call upon and the perspective that brings. I will set about offering alternatives to the status quo, pointing out the status quo has been difficult and stressful and constantly threatens state takeover or total failure - for anyone who truly cares about CCSF and wants to do the right thing, stabilizing CCSF should be a powerful draw. In addition, to the extent that Trustees don't want to go against the stakeholders that got them elected, I can be the scapegoat, since I always put doing the right thing above popularity.

Will the power of the office of Community College Board be enough to achieve this goal?

It has to be … to the extent it's not I will reach out to others in the community for assistance.

What are your #2 and #3 policy goals?

Everything besides #1 is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But assuming we can do that, #2 would be revamping/ changing the registration system. #3 would be partnerships with local businesses and the community (which also ties in to #1)

Will the power of the office of Community College Board be enough to achieve these goals?

Yes, to the extent it's not I will reach out to others in the community for assistance.

What is an existing policy you would like to reform?

Inadequate financial oversight.

What is an "out there" change that you would make to state/local government policy, if you could? (For example: changing how elections work, creating a Bay Area regional government, etc.)

Get rid of rank choice voting.

Personal

Tell us a bit about yourself!

What is your professional background?

Attorney, Entrepreneur, Seed Investor

Are you currently or formerly enrolled at City College, and/or do you have any children who are currently or formerly enrolled at City College?

No, although I have tried to enroll my high school student on 2 occasions including this summer, when she ended up taking Statistics at Lake Tahoe Community college because the registration system at CCSF is so repellent that she found an alternative and easily registered there.

How long have you lived in San Francisco? What brought you here and what keeps you here?

My entire life. I did attend college in Washington DC, law school in Philadelphia and 1 year after law school for a federal clerkship in LA. Multi-gen SF, most of my family is still here, I hope my kids will want to live here. I've never seriously considered living anywhere else.

What do you love most about California and/or San Francisco?

Friends, family, the beauty, ability to bike, run, walk year-round.

What do you dislike the most about California and/or San Francisco?

The decline I've personally witnessed in the last several years, especially the last 5 or so. We seem to be sliding toward oppressively bad government that is allowing people to spiral into addiction, depression and death - as well as treating all citizens terribly.

Tell us about your current involvement in the community (e.g., volunteer groups, neighborhood associations, civic and professional organizations, etc.)

• SOAR-D1

• Georgetown University Board of Regents

• Phillips Exeter Academy 2023 Parent Chair

• Volunteer for my daughter's non-profit: Human Imperative - anti-trafficking work plus training trafficking survivors on computer skills in order to decrease vulnerability

• Active volunteer: BOE recall

• Steering Committee: DA recall

• More than 24 years of Board service and volunteerism at a variety of academic institutions.

• Board: Stop Crime SF (2 years), StopCrime Action (1 year)

• Successfully piloted innovative programming at university level

• Has personally raised over $42 million for education, arts and health.

• Chair, Presidio Trust Board (2021).

• Vice Chair, Presidio Trust Board (2019 - 2021).

• San Francisco Ballet Auxiliary President (2013-2015)

• 15 years on Board of Holy Family Day Home (incl President for 6 years), Chaired capital campaign that re-built school on corner of 16th & Dolores

Thank you

Thank you for giving us your time and answering our questionnaire. We look forward to reading your answers and considering your candidacy!