Looking for Leadership?

by Ciji Ware

Sausalito resident since 2001, NY Times best selling author, Emmy-award winning producer

Before I became a novelist, I was a broadcast journalist and print reporter for 23 years. One day on my 2.7-mile stroll up and down Sausalito’s hills, I was curious (as only a 78-year-old former “news hen” can be) and paused at a picket fence to engage the McGrane clan about their restored Victorian house.

As a result, I’ve come to know the amazing Yasmine McGrane, a candidate for Sausalito/Marin City School Board.

McGrane is a mom juggling distance learning for her kids, a former shop owner for ten years in Mill Valley and worked in the tech world at an executive level. She and her husband have children at Willow Creek in Sausalito, but have served as volunteer tutors and sports coaches at both schools in our district.

McGrane advocates for equity and excellence at both schools. She decided the best way she could help with the crucial and ongoing effort to bring together the predominantly African-American Marin City Bayside MLK School with Willow Creek Academy--a charter school with children of many ethnic backgrounds--was to run for the local school board as a unifier, not an advocate for one school versus the other. “Let’s put aside past battles and focus moving from what’s not working to what is.”

Her simple, powerful idea?  “Take the best of our two schools--each strong for different as well as similar reasons--and make one great public school” situated on the two existing campuses: K-5 at the Willow Creek facility; and PreK and 6-8 at Bayside MLK. As a unifier herself, McGrane is a shining light leading the way.

In my day, I’ve interviewed plenty of candidates running for public office. Yasmine McGrane is exactly who we should elect for Sausalito/Marin City School Board November 3.  

Ciji Ware, Sausalito resident