Mark Good has served on the Gilroy Unified School District Board of Trustees for 16 years and is running for a fifth term, this time for the Trustees Area 2 seat. Experienced and savvy, Good keeps on running because he feels like he can make a difference.
“There’s never been a time as critical for me to run again as there is now,” he said. “We want to maintain and keep the stability of the Board. To introduce a lot of different people at this time would make it difficult to manage the district.”
As he runs for a fifth term, not much has changed for Good, a former police officer who initially campaigned on school safety after a fatal stabbing at Gilroy High in the mid-1990s.
“Now we have a whole different type of safety issue to think about (with Covid-19),” he said.
Even though distance learning has been a challenge for teachers, students and parents alike, Good said he doesn’t take the sooner rather than later approach when it comes to returning to in-person classroom teaching.
“So one of the most important things is managing the transition back to regular education, which everyone agrees is superior to distant learning,” Good said. “But we must do it in a safe manner. When you’re talking about an infectious disease with no real control and no vaccine, I’m not sure how one can say that we’re going to open up all of our schools after 19 days in the red (the standard Santa Clara County has set for schools to possibly reopen should coronavirus infections stay down). I have to worry about the safety of students and school staff—that’s my only concern. Unlike federal, state and local health officials, I don’t have to worry about an economic focus at play here.”
Good said the Board has a proven track record ever since he started serving on it in 2008. In that time, he said, dropout and expulsion rates have been reduced.
“We’ve done some amazing things,” Good said, “and we want to continue the excellence of education within the district.”
Good, 62, has five children who attended school in Gilroy and currently has two grandchildren attending public schools in the city. A practicing attorney by day (and sometimes night), Good said he can be trusted to make the tough decisions and evaluate policies and programs during these tumultuous times.
