Politics are in her blood

Andrew Edwards

When school board candidate Vivian Kirkpatrick-Pilger was growing up

in Westminster, local politics was a big part of family life.

Her mother, Jane Kirkpatrick, was the first woman elected to the

Midway City Sanitary District, where she served for 14 years.

Kirkpatrick-Pilger remembered her childhood home as being “pretty

darn hectic,” a place that lived and breathed public policy.

“I was around it a lot when I was kid, my mom had pictures of her

with Howard Jarvis,” Kirkpatrick-Pilger said.

Howard Jarvis was an anti-property tax advocate who led the

campaign in 1978 for Proposition 13, which imposed strict limits on

property taxes.

Kirkpatrick-Pilger, who is running for a seat on the Huntington

Union High School District’s board, has lived in Orange County her

entire life, and lives with her husband next door to her childhood

home, where her brother and sister still reside. She works as an

administrator in the engineering department at UC Irvine, and though

she called the campus a liberal environment, she still holds the

conservative ideas she learned as a youngster.

She decided to run for school board after she was upset by the

current board’s decision in December to leave its dress code

unchanged after a group of students at Fountain Valley High School

were told they could not wear Christian T-shirts in the senior class

photo. The board voted against a proposal that would have permitted

students to wear religious clothing in school photos.

“I was really moved by that whole thing,” she said.

Though brought up in a political household, politics has not

always been easy for her. As a senior at Westminster High School in

1972, she became alienated from her friends when they wore black

armbands to protest the Vietnam War and her father was a Marine

fighting there.

“I said, ‘You guys got to take your armbands off, my dad is over

there,’” she said. “I had no friends my senior year in high school.”

Michele Miller, assistant dean at the UCI School of Social

Ecology, said she has worked with Kirkpatrick-Pilger for 25 years,

and though they do not usually discuss political issues together, she

described Kirkpatrick-Pilger as a hard at worker.

“Vivian likes to see the right thing done, she is a very committed

person,” Miller said.

In 2002, Kirkatrick-Pilger ran an unsuccessful campaign to serve

on the sanitary district her mother served with, and is in the

running for that position again this year. In the school board race,

she is running a tandem campaign with fellow Westminster resident

Mark Ahrens, who is also running for the sanitary district. Though

she has run before, Kirkpatrick-Pilger said she is still learning

some of the finer points of the political game.

“I don’t know how to work a room yet, I’m not that politically

inclined,” she said. “I have to learn that.”

She met Ahrens through her association with his mother, Judy

Ahrens. Kirkpatrick-Pilger is the president of Citizens for

Government Accountability, a watchdog group that monitors Westminster

politics. Judy Ahrens, who sits on the Westminster School District

Board, is also a member of the citizens’ group.