A True American Grassroots to Legislative Floor Story.
I founded Merced College's first forensics program and took it to the national top eight of 800 teams. That year, Senator Kamala Harris, Congressman Jim Costa, and the Merced County Board of Supervisors recognized me for it.
I handled constituent casework and federal policy research for Congressman Costa's Central Valley district office.
I earned a competitive spot as the youngest Leadership Merced fellow in at least a decade. For a year, my Class 34 cohort studied the twelve industries most vital to our county — water, government, education, agriculture, and health among them.
I organized youth mentorship, food drives, a dozen candidate forums, holiday drives, and parades — putting in the elbow grease myself.
Merced County named me its Youth Citizen of the Year — its highest honor for a young leader — for a year of service, youth mentorship, and organizing.
The city college president hand-picked me to run field operations. I trained thirty-plus volunteers on deep canvassing across a 100,000-voter region.
When the trustee for Area Two, my mentor from Leadership Merced, left to pursue his master's, he urged me to run. So I stepped forward, eager to share my vision for our community's future.
Jessee Espinosa grew up in a Merced family with deep roots in the community, following a pathway of student advocacy, community volunteerism, and leadership, recognized for his passion, energy, and drive to make a lasting impact.
It looks like first-time candidate Jessee Espinosa will win the Area 2 seat on the Board of Education for the Merced City School District. Espinosa, with a whopping 63 percent of the vote, is beating Tsia Xiong in the race.
"This campaign has been an invaluable experience, and I intend to make the most of this opportunity to create meaningful change."
I governed a $200M budget across 19 campuses. My brand of policy making was more than rubber stamping. I wrote and introduced successful new legislation at a rate surpassing every other trustee.
Whereas, a structured literacy approach informed by the Science of Reading has been proven effective at increasing literacy attainment for all students;
Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Board commits to the systematic implementation of Science of Reading based practices in curriculum and instruction by the 2025 to 2026 school year.
I authored the district's Science of Reading resolution myself, grounding our literacy curriculum in five decades of evidence. The board adopted it unanimously.
My fellow county trustees — more than fifty of them — elected me as a CSBA delegate, and I carried the policies that mattered most to our families to the state level.
Superintendent Julianna Stocking brought stability to a district that had cycled through five superintendents since 2020, and points to its growth in literacy as her proudest result.
My analyses ranged from public-power contracts to the amnesty program tied to San Francisco's building-inspection corruption case.