Xuan Kong cares deeply about improving the educational climate in our community and has served our students and schools very well

I write to support the candidacy of Xuan Kong, who is running for reelection to the Acton School Committee. His combination of educational and business skills and his deep commitment to preserving and improving the quality of the education being provided to our children in a very difficult fiscal environment merit the gratitude and continued support of all Acton residents.

I got to know Xuan two years ago while participating with other concerned parents in the effort to gain approval to start instruction in Chinese in Acton-Boxborough Regional Schools. When our daughter Julia, now a junior, started seventh grade at R.J. Grey, my wife and I were dismayed to learn that the foreign language options available were limited to French and Spanish. Furthermore, when she was about to start high school, we were even more disappointed to learn that the “world language” options had been expanded, but only to include Latin and Italian. In an era in which the United States and China are likely to dominate the world economy for decades, and in which peer school systems like Concord-Carlisle, Lexington, and Newton already taught Chinese and sometimes other foreign languages, such as German or Russian, it seemed to me that youths in Acton and Boxborough were being shortchanged by being limited to only Romance languages. When our group spoke with Xuan, he was sympathetic.

However, this was not a parochial issue for him. His own family and other Chinese-speaking families in our community were already benefiting from the Acton Chinese Language School, where he has served on the governing board. But the Sunday classes provided by ACLS were not a good model for youths from non-Chinese families who wanted to start learning Chinese from scratch. Xuan advised our group on how to make our case for launching Chinese instruction to school administrators and to the Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee, and we were pleased by the sympathetic hearing we received. Acton and Boxborough youths of all backgrounds can now benefit from the fact that world languages are no longer so limited, and Julia is now completing her second year of Chinese instruction at ABRHS.

Since getting to know him I have continued to be impressed by Xuan’s constructive role in helping to guide and improve the educational climate and practices in our schools. Whether it is in using his managerial and accounting background to achieve better oversight and control over school budgets or in expanding the network of regular communication channels to PTOs in each elementary school, it is clear that Xuan Kong cares deeply about improving the educational climate in our community and has served our students and schools very well. Maintaining the quality and integrity of our schools in the very difficult fiscal climate that we now find ourselves in cannot be an easy task, but I am confident that Xuan Kong has provided and will continue to provide the kind of vision and leadership that we need in the years ahead.

Martin Whyte