After a six-week campaign and personally knocking on more than 3,000 doors, an EC administrator was elected to the El Segundo unified school board, Nov. 8.

Jeanie Nishime, vice president of student and community advancement, defeated the incumbent El Segundo school board president to win one of two seats on the district’s five-member board of trustees.

“I’m very concerned that we prepare our students adequately for college, from the early years,” Nishime said, “And one thing I had noticed is that there’s no one on the board that has the higher education perspective that I have.”

“I’m glad that someone with 30 years of educational experience has been elected to our board,” Ray Gen, an El Segundo High School English teacher and EC board of trustees member, said.

While she admits that taking on the responsibility in addition to maintaining her full-time position at EC will be demanding, Nishime said her experience in community advancement gives her a unique advantage in “a very active educational foundation that raises a lot of money for the schools.”

“That’s what I love about El Segundo,” she said. “There’s a lot of support from the city council to the business community to the parents,” she said.

“I’m looking forward to maintaining those great relationships so that we can provide professional development for teachers,” Nishime added.

Nishime said her priority as a board member is to bring the El Segundo school district “into the statewide conversation about the changing federal education standards for K-12 student career-readiness and college-preparation,” and the funding needed to meet these requirements.

In addition to the five K-12 schools, which the board distributes across each of the five members to oversee, Nishime said that one of the trustees covers the Southern California Regional Occupation Center (SCROC) and that assignment would be “a good fit” for her.

“I think we put a lot of pressure on kids to go to college and yet that’s not for everybody,” she said. “And that’s where SCROC certainly comes in and EC’s vocational programs as well.”

Nishime also said she supports Assembly Bill 1330, which was passed in September and allows a career-technical education course to substitute for one of the high school graduation requirements.

However, she added that it is optional for high schools and she wants to “make sure that El Segundo adopts that as an option for our high school graduates.”

“I think she’s savvy where educational policy is concerned,” Gen said. “She understands how decisions in the board room affect the classroom.”