Late wife’s efforts inspire his mission
Kuo picked for spouse’s Dublin district seat
In a nearempty boardroom on a recent day, William Kuo raised his right hand and vowed to defend the Constitution as a trustee of the Dublin Unified School District, filling a seat left vacant after the death of his late wife, Catherine Kuo.
It’s a big role to fill. Catherine Kuo was a beloved school district employee who served on the school board since December 2019 and tirelessly fielded texts, phone calls and emails from parents and community members day and night. She was fatally struck by an SUV while volunteering at a food distribution event at Fallon Middle School in Dublin on March 24. She was 48 years old.
Now, William Kuo, 51, is taking up the helm to continue her work in the 12,900student district. The Board of Trustees appointed him May 18 after interviewing him and two other candidates.
Kuo will bring a “wealth of knowledge, expertise, and genuine support from our community,” Dan Cherrier, the president of the
Board of Trustees, said in a May 19 statement.
Kuo is now navigating life as a single father to two children: Natalie, 11, and Thomas, 15. When he told his children he was vying for the open trustee seat, they asked, “Why do you wanna do it?” They had seen the late hours their mom worked.
“I explained to them I need to do it to honor mommy,” he said. “To do what she had started.” They understood, he said.
On the night Kuo was appointed to the board, Thomas was at home completing homework and streaming the board meeting, watching his father get sworn in. Natalie fell asleep by 10 p.m., only learning the next morning that her father was now a trustee, like her mother.
As he raised his hand and took the oath, Kuo said the reality hit him: He was now trusted with representing his school district region.
“This is real, and now the journey begins,” he said.
Emails and comments from supportive parents and community members, shared during the special board meeting ahead of the board vote, struck him. He is “just” Catherine’s husband, Kuo said, but hearing the support was energizing.
“I explained to them I need to do it to honor mommy. To do what she had started.”
William Kuo, on what he told his two children about replacing his late wife as a trustee of the Dublin Unified School District
Unflappable during occasionally heated public board meetings, Catherine Kuo had an easy smile and a natural calm in her demeanor, William Kuo said.
“She’s much more outgoing than I am. She is much more engaging. She smiles a lot more than I do. The description that we have for ourselves is that she was the frontoffice person, and I’m the backoffice IT guy,” William Kuo said with a chuckle, referencing his career as an IT systems administrator.
The couple met in the 1990s at UCLA, where he was a graduate student studying dentistry, and she was an undergraduate studying psychology. They met at the University Presbyterian Church, where he first saw her playing bass guitar for the church worship band.
They married and after college moved to Dublin to live closer to their parents in the Bay Area. She worshiped with others at weekly Bible Study Fellowship gatherings, she devoured books with a local mom’s group comprised mostly of firstgeneration Korean mothers, and was the founder of a popular group for East Bay Asian American parents on Meetup when their daughter was a toddler.
William Kuo said he was in awe of his wife’s ease at navigating trustee duties, juggling volunteer work and motherhood.
Her resiliency was grounded in her faith, William Kuo said, and she grounded her family in that faith. At 2 years old, she endured openheart surgery for a heart defect. As an adult, she underwent surgery for scoliosis, keeping her in bed for weeks, a scar running along her body. In 2012, she was treated for Choriocarcinoma, a fastgrowing cancer that developed from her uterus and moved to her lungs — leading to surgery and months of chemotherapy.
“She never got angry. Her strength was ...” William Kuo paused, his voice trembling. “It was just amazing. I would just be so mad at the world if I had to go through the pain that she went through, right? I would be grumpy and just be mean at people. But she wasn’t. She was always so calm and never cursing life.”
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office has declined to file criminal charges against the motorist who struck Catherine Kuo, and police said that while the driver was found to be at fault for the incident, “there was no criminal intent found.”
William Kuo said that in the wake of his wife’s death, he has found himself adjusting his own personality to better match Catherine’s. She was encouraging, and he was more pragmatic. She encouraged her kids to take risks and not be afraid of failing.
“The light in my life, so to speak, the one that is always encouraging me, is no longer there, so that spirit is living within us now,” William Kuo said.
Catherine Kuo carved out time every day to watch an episode of “Kim’s Convenience,” a Netflix show about a Korean Canadian family who runs a convenience store in Toronto. The show resonated deeply with her — a woman who was born and raised in the Bay Area by Korean immigrant parents — and with William Kuo, who is Taiwanese and whose family immigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old.
The family had only four episodes left to watch of the sitcom when Catherine Kuo died, and the children can’t bring themselves to finish the show, he said. Someday, the trio will pick up where they left off.
“We don’t know when,” he said.