Rony Jonathan Baltazar-Lopez

Through the completion of the UAPP 701: Public Policy course, I gained the knowledge to:

• Understand key attributes of the public policymaking process in the United States, including action arenas, stakeholders, and sources and uses of power.
• Identify and distinguish the essential features of public policy issues, including the policy players, their definitions of problems, sources of controversy, public history, and strategies for resolution.
• Appraise the intersection of policy, politics, and ideology, including the roles of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, and debate the implications of the intersection for the development and uses of policy analysis.
• Employ policy process models and theories to explain public policy goals, problems, and choices from multiple vantage points and with multiple methods of inquiry.
• Collect, evaluate, and appropriate use of information on public policy issues.
• Communicate effectively ideas and findings with respect to public policy issues.

As a final deliverable for the course, I prepared a policy brief and oral presentation on addressing immigration reform in the United States.

Relevant Professional Work

As a son of immigrants, immigration-related issues are personal to me. When I first joined the Milford School Board, I noticed that there was no board policy that explicitly outlined our commitment as a school district in safeguarding students’ personal identifiable information (PII). In addition, none of the existing board policies gave clarity on how the district should proceed with providing a student’s PII in cases of immigration enforcement for undocumented students.

Working with the superintendent and our legal counsel, I introduced Board Policy 5313: Protection of the Privacy of Students.