"Family Gap" Motivates Board President - Marin IJ - June, 12 2006 - Don Speich

'Family gap' motivates board president
Don Speich

When George Stratigos was a kid in Sausalito in the 1960s and '70s his parents, like many, took extraordinary steps to keep him out of the city's schools. They sent him to a Catholic school in Greece for the early grades.

Though he and his family continued to live in Sausalito, they claimed he resided in San Rafael by giving the address of family owned property, so he could attend middle school in Terra Linda.

He went on to Terra Linda High School and was elected a student representative to the San Rafael school board - and still he lived in Sausalito.

Stratigos, 45, said every morning he would get on a bus in Sausalito filled with Sausalito kids, all heading for public and private schools elsewhere in Marin. Nobody he knew went to Sausalito schools, where the students were predominantly black and from Marin City.

He graduated from Terra Linda High School in 1979.

Though he did not know it at the time, the daily exodus he was part of prompted a vision that would ultimately consume him in middle age: reversing the course of a decades-old history by returning Sausalito kids to Sausalito schools.
Or, as he puts it, "to fill the gap" that has crippled the picturesque bayside community by reducing its inhabitants to only young adults or older residents with either no children or ones well past school age.

"There is a gap, the young family gap," he said. "We have young families who live here until their children are 5 and then they move away."

There are no young middle-age families who, he said, are "the heart" of any community, and until this "gap" is filled, Sausalito will continue in a downward spiral, a city in search of a strong pulse that will assure a vibrant future.
And that will be impossible with a failing school system, Stratigos decided.

He was a member of the Sausalito City Council in the mid-1990s when this realization hit him, and he said it became increasingly clear that city government was and would continue to be impotent until there were successful schools, ones that would allow the town's young families to remain in Sausalito.

It is this age group of adults, he said, that provides the energy and leadership and vision for vibrant communities elsewhere in Marin. Without them, a town's history becomes static, a circle where past, present and future are one and the same.
So Stratigos set his sights on the district, and decided that before anything good could happen, the leadership must be replaced. Along with current trustee Shirley Thornton and others, he kicked off a 1997 campaign to recall trustees.

The campaign turned on replacing repeated failures of the past with programs that would raise test scores and thereby - this was implicit and never directly stated - create schools white parents would want for their children.

Thornton was elected to the board in 1998 and Stratigos in 2000.

Nine years later, though test scores have improved somewhat, young white families continue to move out of the district or send their children elsewhere to school.
But if this is disappointing to Stratigos, it is difficult to detect.

Stratigos is a believer and an optimist, a man driven to turn the schools around. His strength of conviction reflects perhaps his continuing closeness to his family, deep involvement in the Greek Orthodox Church and roots in a learning tradition as old as Socrates and Plato.

Linda Remy, a former member of the Marin Healthcare District board, has known Stratigos for many years and thinks he is the right man for the job.

"I actually think he is one of the most creative guys in Marin County," she said.
He is "passionate" in his beliefs "and just puts his heart and soul into whatever he does." He is, she added, "working very, very hard to eliminate the racial inequities there."

Over the years, Stratigos, who graduated from San Francisco State University with a bachelor's degree in business administration, has worked in a variety of positions, among them the head of a successful $50 million fund-raising drive for the University of Pacific's dental school in San Francisco.

For relaxation, Stratigos, who is not married, often goes to his family home on the island of Aegina, a short distance southwest of Athens, where his parents met before getting married in San Francisco and settling in Sausalito.

"Greece has been a great place to go because it teaches me about community," he said.
It is there, he said, that he learned first-hand the value of a place where there is no gap between generations.

Contact Don Speich via e-mail at dspeich@marinij.com