Longtime Costa Mesa resident and community advocate Vicky Rodriguez is running for a seat on the Newport-Mesa Unified School Board in the Nov. 8 election as another way, she said, to support her community.
“I can’t turn the other way when someone needs help,” Rodriguez told The Epoch Times.
She is a certified immigration consultant and owns a tax and notary business in Costa Mesa.
Prior to the pandemic, she offered free notary services at the senior center in Costa Mesa. She provided free classes there to prepare immigrants to become citizens.
She is running against incumbent trustee Ashely Anderson and candidate Kristen Seaburn for the district’s Area 7, which includes Pomona, Rea, Victoria, Whittier, and Wilson elementary schools, and Estancia High School.
Rodriguez said she would be a good representative of the area because she speaks Spanish, as does much of the community she would serve, already knows many residents, and has lived in the area since 1995.
She said school board members should be more involved at the school level.
“We should get together with schools and check out which kids are doing really bad,” she said. “There must be something going on at the house. That means kids can’t concentrate.”
Rodriguez, who ran unsuccessfully for school board in 2018, said she would work to allocate more tutoring funding for failing students, if elected.
“Some of these parents are barely making it by. They’re not worried about tutoring. They’re worried about having a place to live and food to eat,” she said.
The district has an after-school tutoring program, she said, but there are too many students and too few teachers.
“That’s not going to cut it,” she said. “The needs on this part of town are so different, and we need to focus on that.”
As a tax consultant, Rodriguez said she has seen that many children who grow up in poor families receiving food stamps and other public assistance tend to stay in that situation as they grow up.
“We need to change that,” she said. “We need to help the parents, not just the kids. … If we don’t get to the bottom of the problem, it isn’t going to change.”
She said drugs, high school gangs, and fighting are issues plaguing Costa Mesa’s portion of the school district.
These are among the most immediate problems she intends to address, if elected, she said.
“When you take care of this, the kids will be concentrating better. They‘ll be safer, and they’ll be doing better in school,” she said.
Rodriguez, who has three children—two grown and one in high school—is an ambassador at the Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce, a voluntary position encouraging member participation, and has been involved in her childrens schools’ PTA.
In 2018, while her son was attending Paularino Elementary School, she said she helped spearhead a renovation of the school’s library by securing furniture donations from IKEA.
The Gift of Giving
Rodriguez was born in Guadalajara, Mexico before immigrating to Orange County as a child.She said her grandparents used to host large gatherings in her hometown in December for the Christian holiday Latin Americans call Los Posadas.
Festivities included parades and donations of food for those in need.
In her nearly 28 years of living in Costa Mesa, she said she has followed in their footsteps and has held multiple toy, clothing, and food drives.
One of which was for Paulorino Elementary School students in 2017, when she organized a toy drive with donations provided by TJ Maxx.
Rodriguez is also active in her local Lions Club, which provides community service for the city’s youth, such as raising funds for school supplies.
She also makes monthly trips to Tijuana to bring clothes, blankets, and groceries—donated from her and Orange County locals—to poor families in the Mexican border city.
For the last five years, Rodriguez said she has filled up the flatbed of her white Toyota Tundra with the donations and hands them out one by one.
