TUSTIN : Tuchman to Head School Board Again

Gloria Matta Tuchman was elected president Mondayof the Board of Trustees of the Tustin Unified School District. It will be her second term as president in eight years with the school board.

Tuchman, 51, a first-grade teacher at Taft Elementary School in Santa Ana, is best known for her controversial stand on bilingual education. She has advocated teaching non-English students almost exclusively in English.

She is the founder of the Campaign for California Kids, a statewide organization that advocates moving children with limited English skills into mainstream classes, rather than bilingual classes, as quickly as possible.

Tuchman, who was first elected in 1985, has served on three national education boards and is a member of the Fund for the Improvement and Reform of Schools and Teaching, a nonprofit group. She has taught for 30 years in California and Arizona.

In Monday’s school board reorganization, Todd Ferguson, who is into the second year of his four-year term, was elected vice president and clerk. He is a science teacher at the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District.

Ferguson also was appointed the school district’s representative to the Orange County School Boards Assn. Page committee.

The school board appointed trustee Merlin L. Henry Jr. representative to the Orange County Nominating Committee on School District Organization for 1994; Nancy Cast to the Coastline Regional Occupational Program and Jane Bauer to the District Academic and Professional Growth Committee.