Business owner, nonprofit leader and attorney Nicole Chiu-Wang is one of five Palo Alto Unified School District Board of Education candidates, running to address problems with education and underrepresentation. Chiu-Wang said her prior experience running for the PAUSD board demonstrates the importance of perseverance.
“Since putting myself out there in 2022 and saying I was going to run again, I’m showing you all that failure is okay,” Chiu-Wang said. “I made lemonade from lemons, and I got to work and I became a leader in my community. Our kids need to see that resilience and see that even if you don’t win, you get back up—you find ways to contribute and you keep going.”
Chiu-Wang said she hopes her experiences can show students that setbacks and transitions are part of a broader journey.
“Our students need to see leaders that have had non-traditional backgrounds or have gotten up from failure,” Chiu-Wang said. “For me, I’ve career transitioned many times, and I think that is probably more likely to be what your generation [students] experiences.”
For the past two years, Chiu-Wang said she has been actively involved in the Palo Alto community by contributing to the South Palo Alto Food Closet, acting as co-president of the Chinese Parents’ Club of Palo Alto and being a board member of the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific American Democratic Club.
Chiu-Wang said that shortly after her loss, she was invited to be executive director of DreamCatchers, a local nonprofit organization that aims to close the opportunity and educational gap in the Palo Alto student community.
“The day after I lost the election, there was a DreamCatchers community event that I had been invited to,” Chiu-Wang said. “Nobody really thought I was going to show up because I just lost the election the night before. … I went because I knew that the mission of DreamCatchers had to do with educational equity, which I’m really passionate about.”
According to Chiu-Wang, increasing diversity is a central priority of her campaign. Chiu-Wang said promoting representation starts in our classrooms.
“I know we had a Muslim family in our TK [Transitional Kindergarten] class, and their son said he didn’t want to celebrate Christmas because he felt like he never saw his culture and religion celebrated,” Chiu-Wang said. “He felt like, ‘How come they don’t care about what we celebrate?’”
Chiu-Wang said it’s important for schools to work towards being inclusive of all cultures and backgrounds.
“We need to make sure that our libraries are stocked with books that are representative,” Chiu-Wang said. “Not just around race and ethnicity, but also in terms of different kinds of relationships, different kinds of families, families with two moms or gender non-binary … make sure our kids are exposed in all these different ways.”
Chiu-Wang’s campaign is being endorsed by prominent leaders in California and the local Palo Alto community such as Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Assemblyman Marc Berman, current PAUSD Board Members Jennifer DiBrienza and Shounak Dharap, as well as five former Palo Alto mayors and six former board members. Chiu has also garnered support from larger organizations such as the Santa Clara County Democratic Party, National Women’s Caucus Silicon Valley, California School Employees Association Chapter 301 and Democratic Activists for Women Now.
Chiu-Wang is one of five candidates running for three open seats on the school board. The other candidates are Rowena Chiu, Chris Colohan, Alison Kamhi and Josh Salcman.
