A grass-roots group of parents in Northern California’s Cupertino Union School District — a magnet for Indian American families — has raised $1.1 million in one month to save the jobs of 115 teachers slated for layoffs due to state budget cuts.
“Their Future is Now,” a nine-member parent-run volunteer committee, hopes to raise a total of $3 million by May 15, to offset more than $6.8 million in state budget cuts. The committee is next gearing up for an intensive effort May 4, when several local businesses will donate a percentage of their sales that day to the campaign.
 Mohan Srinivasan, a Facebook software engineer who serves as the committee’s Web site designer, told India-West he was very confident that the committee would achieve its $3 million goal.
“There’s a lot of awareness across the district. Parents who were initially skeptical are now seeing that this is doable,” said Srinivasan, whose twin nine-year-olds Sreehari and Eashwari attend Christa MacAuliffe Elementary School in Saratoga.
“There’s been a significant uptake over the past three or four days,” he added. Srinivasan is also working with local companies to snare corporate matching dollars for the campaign.
The district’s 25 high-achieving schools — in Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Altos, San Jose and Sunnyvale — have attracted the San Francisco Bay Area’s Indian American population, who make up more than one-third of the district’s families.
Academic Performance Index scores for the 20 elementary and five intermediate schools consistently rank in the 900s. Faria Elementary School in Cupertino is ranked the number one public school in California, and 11 of the 484 elementary schools named statewide as 2010 “distinguished schools” are in CUSD.
“We as Indians, culturally, really value good education, and tend to migrate to areas that place a premium on education,” Anjali Kausar, who serves on the Cupertino Union School District Board, |
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