Mary Anne Ahtye

     Mary Anne Ahtye was a 12 year teacher in the Child Development Program in San Francisco Unified School District and worked for 20 years with United Educators of San Francisco as a Senior Field Rep. She retired in 2006 and remains active with APALA, UESF, CLUW and continues to travel the world.

      Mary Anne has lived in Novato for the last 30 years and commuted into San Francisco for work. She has been married for 35 years to her husband James L. Watkins, aka Larry. She has one stepdaughter, Nicole Terry, and one granddaughter, Madison Terry.

      Mary Anne has been a member in good standing of UESF for 32 years. At the beginning of her teaching career she volunteered to be the building representative at schools that she worked at and from there worked on various union campaigns such as Summer of Support, San Francisco Organizing Project, and many election campaigns for union political endorsees. She also was the liaison for the UESF chapter of the Gay Lesbian United Educators (GLUE), one of the first non-minority committees of the union. In 1986 she was hired by the then president of the San Francisco Federation of Teachers, Joan Marie Shelley, to work as a field representative for the union. (Mary Anne says, "In 1986 there were very few Asian union reps. We were not represented in the House of Labor. My union acknowledged that there was a need to have field representatives that reflected the Asian Pacific Islander teacher and paraprofessional population of San Francisco Unified and to her credit Joan Marie hired me to work for the union").