State Board vacancies filled with new members, executive director
Former Executive Director Burr moves to board seat, replaced by Stapf Walters
Published: January 15, 2013
Gov. Jerry Brown named two new members and one reappointment to the California State Board of Education this week. Sue Burr, who recently retired as the State Board’s executive director, returns as a member of the board and will be replaced as executive director by Karen Stapf Walters. Burr and fellow new board member Nicolasa Sandoval will be sworn in at the board’s Jan. 16 meeting in Sacramento, along with reappointed member Ilene W. Strauss.
Burr, of Rancho Murieta, advised both Govs. Brown and Gray Davis on education policy. She has been executive director and governmental relations director for the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association, and was an assistant superintendent with the Elk Grove Unified School District from 2000 to 2003. Before that, Burr was co-director of the California State University Institute for Education Reform and a principal consultant for the state Senate.
Sandoval, of Lompoc, has been education director for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians since 2009 and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, since 2007. She worked at Nonprofit Support Center as a consulting manager from 2008 to 2009 and community outreach specialist from 2007 to 2008. She has served in multiple positions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and was a press assistant at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the early 1990s. She earned an education doctorate from UC Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in museum studies from George Washington University.
Straus, of Marina del Rey, was reappointed to the State Board, where she has served since 2011. She is currently chair of the screening committee. She has been an independent consultant on student achievement issues since 2011, and an assistant superintendent for educational services with the Beverly Hills Unified School District from 2006 until 2011. She was an administrator with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District in 2006 and principal of Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica from 1986 to 2002. She was named the California Secondary Principal of the Year in 1991. Straus has an education doctorate from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree from California State University, Northridge.
Stapf Walters, a Sacramento resident, becomes the governor’s education policy adviser as well as the State Board’s executive director. She was named interim executive director of the Association of California School Administrators in 2012 and was previously the association’s assistant executive director of governmental relations. From 1996 to 1998, Stapf Walters was director of Education Seminar Programs for the Institute for Fiduciary Education, and had previously been a consultant and senior staff member for state Sen. Lucy Killea of San Diego. Stapf Walters taught social studies and English in middle and high schools in California and Ohio from the late 1970s to 1990.
The new appointments leave one vacancy on the State Board. The State Board website has biographical information on the panel’s other members, as well as meeting agendas and minutes and other information. Members of the State Board require Senate confirmation; the executive director does not.