Jill Wynns
Director, Region 5, San Francisco County & USD
In December 2013, Jill Wynns, a board member in the San Francisco
Unified School District in San Francisco County, became the Region 5
Director of the California School Boards Association, representing San
Francisco and San Mateo Counties. She served as the Region 5 Director
from 1995 to 2000 and 2005 to 2009, and served on the Delegate Assembly
from 1993-94, 2001-05 and 2010. Wynns has been a member of the San
Francisco Board of Education since 1993. She is a major leader in the
urban education community and an expert on California school finance,
urban education reform issues and governance, charter schools,
privatization of public schools, healthy school food programs and
labor-management collaboration.
She is the former director of a
children’s advocacy organization and works as a consultant specializing
in education issues, community organizing and development. She was a member of the San Francisco team that participated in the
Public Education Leadership Project, the first-ever joint project of the
Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She has served on the board of the Council of Urban Boards of Education
(CUBE) of the National School Boards Association, and is a former
President of the Association of California Urban School Districts.
She was a working group member of the California Master Plan for
Education, served on the California Student Attendance Review Board and
the California Title 1 Committee of Practitioners, appointed by State
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell. She is an active
participant in the Council of the Great City Schools, as well as CUBE,
lobbying regularly on federal education issues.
Wynns has authored articles for journals and newsletters, and is a
regular workshop presenter at conferences and symposia. She successfully
led a community coalition to keep the De Young Museum in Golden Gate
Park, and was part of the campaign to rebuild the California Academy of
Sciences. Wynns holds a Bachelor of Arts in humanities from New College
at Hofstra University in New York, and studied at Harvard and Wiks
Folkhogskola in Balingsta, Sweden.
Wynns has been married since 1971 and is the mother of two sons and
one daughter, all of whom attended public school in San Francisco, and
is the grandmother of two.