Mission Statement
CSTACE is a non-profit, non-partisan organization representing the interests of Marin property owners who would prefer not to fund other people's children.
CSTACE aims to:
- Keep local taxes and fees on education as low as possible, regardless of what children may "need" to "learn."
- Encourage officials to prioritize spending on things that raise property values over things that raise test scores.
- Improve "transparency" at local school districts so we can find line items to weaponize in our fear campaigns.
- Educate taxpayers about the outrageous cost of educating taxpayers' children, using alarming language like TAX TSUNAMI and SNEAK-E TAX.
- Ensure that tax measures are held to standards so exacting that no measure could possibly pass them.
Board of Directors
CSTACE is an all-volunteer organization led by our Board of Directors. Our directors are community leaders who commit substantial ongoing time and expertise to preventing children's education. Our board represents the rich diversity of wealthy, white homeowners in Marin County. None currently have children enrolled in public schools. We believe this gives us an objective perspective on public education funding, in the same way that people who don't eat at restaurants have an objective perspective on food safety regulations.
MeMe Grimsworth
Prescott Wainwright-Chadwell
Prescott retired from a 30-year career in mergers and acquisitions, where he specialized in making companies "leaner" — which is a polite way of saying he fired people for a living. He now chairs the Belvedere Beautification Committee, which recently spent $40,000 on decorative bollards for a cul-de-sac. He considers this a better use of public funds than hiring a school librarian. Prescott holds an MBA from somewhere impressive that he brings up within ninety seconds of meeting you. Hobbies include golf, wine collecting, and using the phrase "fiduciary responsibility" at dinner parties where no one asked.
Buckley Ashford-Pennington IV
Buckley is a semi-retired intellectual property attorney who spent three decades helping corporations patent things that already existed. He now applies the same creative interpretation skills to school district budgets, finding waste in line items like "classroom supplies" and "heating." Buckley has filed formal objections to the ballot language of every school measure since 2011. He once delayed a bond election by three months over a dispute about an Oxford comma. Billable hours: 47. Children affected: 12,000. Commas disputed: 1. He sits on two oversight committees, both of which he joined specifically to obstruct.
Muffy Covington-Astor
Muffy spent twenty years in venture capital, funding startups that disrupted industries employing thousands of people. She considers this "creating value." She now brings her disruptive energy to CSTACE, where she is disrupting children's access to education. Muffy graduated summa cum laude from a university whose sweatshirt she still wears to Whole Foods. She once sat on the board of a children's literacy nonprofit for eleven months before resigning to join CSTACE. She does not see the irony. We've checked. She has checked. Nobody sees it except everyone.
Chadsworth Pennington-Thwaite III
Chadsworth retired from a career in medical device sales, an industry where a single knee replacement costs more than a year of the school tax he finds unconscionable. He has a professional background in budgeting, long-range planning, and financial analysis — skills he deploys exclusively to argue that schools should have less money. The kitchen was "necessary." The school tax is "theft." Chadsworth drives a $78,000 SUV to oversight committee meetings where he argues that the district's $400 printer budget is "out of control." He does not own a calculator. He does addition on a legal pad, in pen, with a furrowed brow.
Tad Whitfield-Calhoun
Tad made his fortune in commercial real estate, buying properties, raising rents, and converting affordable retail spaces into boutique dog grooming salons. He served on the local Parks Commission for six years, during which time he approved $2.3M in trail improvements while opposing $1,664 in school taxes. Tad coached youth soccer for a decade. He coached children. For free. While opposing the taxes that fund those children's schools. His LinkedIn says "Investor / Philanthropist / Disruptor" despite his primary disruption being to school board meetings where he reads aloud from a binder for eleven minutes.
Bunny Vandermeer-Houghton
Bunny spent fifteen years as a wealth management consultant, helping high-net-worth individuals minimize their tax exposure — experience she now applies to minimizing children's exposure to education. She holds an MBA and a real estate license, which she obtained "just to understand the market" and has used exactly once to help a board member flip a rental property. Bunny previously chaired a fundraising gala for a children's hospital, raising $340,000 in a single evening. She opposes raising $1,664/year for schools. She brings exactly the expertise you'd need to support school funding, and has chosen not to.
A Note on Board Composition
You may notice certain commonalities among our board members. They are universally wealthy. They are universally white. They are universally older. None have children currently enrolled in public schools. Several hold elite degrees and now dedicate their formidable educations to ensuring that local children receive less of one.
Our board does not include any current public school parents, any renters, any people of color, anyone under 50, or anyone whose primary concern is whether their child's classroom has a functioning heater. We believe this gives us the objectivity necessary to evaluate whether schools deserve funding.
When critics suggest our board's homogeneity might create blind spots, we respond: "We are non-partisan." We then return to using fear tactics — TAX TSUNAMI, SNEAK-E TAX, $1.04 BILLION — to defeat school measures.
How to Join the Board
Required: Marin County homeowner ($2M+ property value). Zero children in public school. Willingness to describe $4.56/day as catastrophic. Ability to attend daytime meetings (retirees preferred). At least two hyphenated surnames in your family tree. Basic addition skills only — division, percentages, and causal reasoning will disqualify you.
Preferred: Elite university degree (for credibility when opposing education). Professional background in finance (for credibility when misrepresenting costs). Ownership of at least one item of clothing embroidered with a small animal. Flame-resistant outerwear for the Annual Playground Burn.
This is a parody. All board member names and biographies are fictional. If your real local anti-school-tax organization has a board that looks suspiciously like the one described above, that's not our fault. That's the point.
📢 Our Right-Wing Fear Tactics: A Primer
CSTACE employs a sophisticated arsenal of rhetorical techniques borrowed from national conservative playbooks, carefully localized for affluent Marin County audiences:
1. Catastrophizing: A 52-cent-per-square-foot tax becomes a TAX TSUNAMI. A school maintenance bond becomes a $1.04 BILLION TAKEOVER. Context is the enemy of outrage.
2. Populist framing: We present ourselves as defenders of "ordinary taxpayers" despite representing homeowners with a median property value of $1.4 million.
3. Procedural obstruction: When we can't win on substance, we challenge the timing, the ballot language, the election type, or the methodology. There is always a procedural reason to oppose a school tax.
4. False equivalence: We claim to be "non-partisan" and to have "supported" some taxes, pointing to the one wildfire tax we endorsed when our houses were literally on fire.
5. Punchy branding: SNEAK-E TAX is more memorable than "a parcel tax renewal with an updated assessment methodology." We know this. We exploit it.
Advisory Group
Our Advisory Group gives periodic guidance on projects and consists of retired professionals, real estate investors, and one person who claims to have been a teacher in the 1970s. The Advisory Group unanimously believes that schools were better funded in their day, while simultaneously opposing every mechanism by which schools could be funded today. They are also all white, all wealthy, and all Republican, but in a slightly different zip code distribution than the board.