A candidate for school board in West Sacramento, CA is making news because of his application paperwork. Apparently, spelling and grammar aren’t his thing. Nguyen immigrated to the U.S. at age 12, and learning English as a second language as an adolescent may be a part. He also said he typed his application on his phone and the auto correct feature distorted some of his text. I can relate to that. When I recently tried to send a message to a friend, “He is here” somehow turned into “He is Herb.” That made a difference since we were talking about the birth of my son. He is here, but he is not named Herb. My sister’s name was converted to “donuts” when she was phone-typing.

The Sacramento Bee is endorsing Nguyen. They had this to say:

But for voters tired of the clash of the titans, an inspiring, qualified candidate is on the ballot who is not associated with either of the factions: Linh Nguyen. He arrived in the United States as a 12-year-old in 1983, his family fleeing Vietnam by boat. He graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1993 with a degree in computer science and engineering. He co-founded a multimillion-dollar IT consulting firm, which he sold in 2005. He would bring a strong background in data and finance to the board. Nguyen is an active parent, with two children in Washington Unified schools. He sees education as the great equalizer in American society, an entree to the American dream and he is distressed at performance levels in Washington Unified, particularly at the high school. He has a sophisticated understanding of performance measurement, and would like to get beyond the Academic Performance Index to include AP classes, college acceptance, career technical courses. A top priority for Nguyen would be the more than half of the graduating class that does not go on to college. “We need a path for them,” he says, and he would be attentive to vocational technical education and mentoring.

Actually, he sounds like he has some good ideas as well as some fiscal sense to bring to the district. I’m sure there is an administrative assistant around there somewhere who could do some proofreading for him if he manages to get elected.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.