About Keith

RAISED BY TEACHERS

My father taught industrial arts at Foothill High School in Tustin. Shop, drafting, architecture. He was there for most of a long career after starting out at Brea Olinda.‍ ‍

I graduated from Foothill. Being the shop teacher's kid at your own high school is its own particular experience, and I recommend it.

‍My mother taught business and typing at Garden Grove High School, then spent the second half of her career as a counselor at Rancho Alamitos.

Between them, 50+ years in Orange County public high schools.

‍We would call most of what my father taught career technical education now. Then it was just shop. His students left able to build something and read a drawing. My mother's left able to run an office, and later, once she moved into counseling, she spent her days on the question of what a student was going to do after graduation (and, sometimes, how to get to graduation).‍ ‍

Growing up in that house gives you a particular view of school. You hear about it at dinner. You learn early that the person at the front of the room is carrying a lot more than a lesson plan, and that most of what makes a school work is invisible from the outside.‍ ‍

So I studied mathematics with a concentration in education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The plan was to teach.‍ ‍

THE LONG WAY AROUND

‍ The plan did not survive my twenties. I went after medical school instead, which took me to Missouri, where I worked in an ICU while I chased it. That did not come together, for reasons that had nothing to do with grades.‍ ‍

Technology was the fastest way to pay the bills. It turned into a twenty-five year career.‍ ‍

I kept teaching anyway. Early on, part of my job was training our clients on SQL and reporting, which is teaching whether or not anyone calls it that. After I finished my master's I started teaching at night. I have taught at the college level for fourteen years since. Later, in Arizona, I earned a single subject credential in mathematics, still expecting a high school classroom eventually. Then family needs beckoned and I returned to California. The credential does not transfer across state lines. I never used it.‍ ‍ ‍

The teaching never actually stopped. It just kept changing forms. It only took thirty years to get back to a math classroom.

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WHAT I TEACH

‍ I am an adjunct instructor at Laguna College of Art and Design. The course is Math 102, Business and Budgeting for Creatives.‍ ‍

It is a practical class. Art students graduate into careers where they have to price their own work, read a contract, run a small business, and know where the money goes. Most of them arrive convinced they are bad at math. Most of them leave able to build a budget and a P&L and defend it.‍ ‍

I mention this because it is relevant to the job I am asking for. A school board does not teach classes or run campuses. It approves budgets, sets policy, works with the superintendent, and asks questions in public about where the money is going.‍ ‍

I teach budgeting. That is a piece of what this job is.

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THE OTHER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS‍ ‍

I built software. I started as a developer and worked my way up, from individual contributor to Vice President of Software Engineering at one company, and from principal engineer to Director of Technical Services and general manager of a spin-off at another. Much of it was mission-critical software in regulated environments, where the cost of getting it wrong is not measured in inconvenience.‍ ‍

The parts of that work that matter here are not the impressive-sounding ones. I have managed budgets that did not close and had to decide what to cut. I have watched what happens to people when leadership handles a hard stretch badly. I have run teams through difficult years without turning them into a crisis.‍ ‍

More recently my work has focused on artificial intelligence: how organizations adopt it, and how they govern it responsibly. I serve on an advisory board for a company and it’s non-profit arm, where I advise on technology strategy and AI adoption. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

HOME‍ ‍

I grew up in North Tustin and went to Tustin Unified schools. I spent twenty-five years elsewhere, in Missouri and Arizona, and came back to California to be near my parents. I have lived in Huntington Beach since 2022, when Daina and I married.

‍Orange County public high schools employed my parents for many years and educated me. This is not a place I arrived at recently.

‍We walk to the beach many days. I do the grocery shopping at the Albertsons next to Huntington Beach High School. On Tuesday nights we enjoy Surf City Nights on Main Street when we aren’t teaching at our respective college/university jobs (class always seems to fall on Tuesday nights).‍ ‍

WHY THE ARTS‍ ‍

We go to Academy of Performing Arts productions at Huntington Beach High as often as we can. APA is one of the things this district built that people outside Huntington Beach do not know enough about.‍ ‍

I am at Westminster High regularly too. Daina brings in artists from other countries who design a mural with her students and paint the whole thing in a week, and her Wearable Art show is one of the better nights on my calendar (see picture on thus page). Westminster is not in Area 4. That does not change how I think about it. Trustees are elected by area and serve the entire district, and every campus in it has programs worth knowing about. I’m looking forward to finding out more about the gems at our other schools.‍ ‍

Arts education is not a supplement to everything else students learn. It is a different thing and a complementary one. It gives students a way to make something and to say something at an age when they are not always certain anyone is listening.‍ ‍

I heard a teenage artist put this better than I can, at a panel at the Huntington Beach Art Center. The world does not always want to hear from teenagers, she said. Art lets them say what they need to say, and say it as loud as they want.‍ ‍

WHY THIS SEAT‍ ‍

Trustee areas are new for us. The retiring incumbent for Area 4 has server this district for a long time. I’m honored that he is supporting me to carry his work forward.‍ ‍

The next several years will have challenges that may not make headlines. Enrollment is declining across Orange County and this district is not exempt. Budget pressure is real and it compounds quietly. The effects of the pandemic and learning loss are still being felt in our student population. We need to recruit and retain the excellent educators we have. Artificial intelligence showed up in classrooms before anyone had a policy for it.‍ ‍

None of that is a crisis. All of it needs attention, preparation, and someone willing to ask the unglamorous questions and work to help find solutions.‍ ‍

I am not a politician and I am not trying to become one. There is no next office. I want to be useful to a district my family has a stake in, for as long as this community will have me, and then hand it off in better shape than I found it.‍ ‍

CLOSING‍ ‍

If that sounds like what you want in a trustee, I would like to hear from you.

If there are topics of concern or importance for you, I would like to hear from you.

I am doing this the slow way, one conversation at a time.‍

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KeithEllis4HBUHSD@gmail.com (949) 414-6099