Board of Directors

Rhonda Racine is the founder and CEO of Lydian Academy. In 2001 she co-founded a non-traditional high school in Los Altos, where she successfully led the school to its first full accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and served as principal from 2001-2006.

Ms. Racine holds a California teaching credential and an MS in Computer Science. She also has a certificate in College Admissions and Career Planning from UC Berkeley. She has taught for UC Berkeley Extension, Department of Education and in Palo Alto public schools. Prior to her education career, Ms. Racine worked in the high tech industry for 20 years as a software engineer.

Ms. Racine is also the parent of two Palo Alto High School graduates, one of whom followed a more traditional academic path, and the other took the creative route to become a professional musician. Ms. Racine's experience with local schools is from the dual perspective of an educator and a parent whose children had widely differing school experiences.

Ramesh Gangolli, educated at the Universities of Bombay and Cambridge, and at MIT, is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle. After taking his doctoral degree at MIT, he taught there for a year before joining the faculty of the University of Washington in 1962. Since then, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, serving as Chair between 1981-84 and 1991-93. He has been active in mathematical research as well as in education during most of his career, and has served in a number of capacities in service to the profession: on advisory committees of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, as a Trustee of the American Mathematical Society, Chair of the AMS's Committee on Education, and in other similar roles. For the last five years he has served as Principal Investigator of two NSF supported projects involving K-12 mathematics teachers in the Seattle Metropolitan Area.

Sylma Fine is licensed as a Marriage & Family Therapist currently in private practice in Palo Alto, where she specializes in working with adolescents and their frustrated families.

As a Registered Board Certified Art Therapist she makes use of art therapy as a highly effective adjunct to talk therapy assisting clients who say “No way” to other forms of therapy.

Using her training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, she has facilitated workshops dealing with the issues of suicide and self-harm behaviors in the local as well as South Bay communities. She also provides supervision to psychology interns at a local agency.

Her experience includes being a preschool teacher, and her work with teenagers has taken her to an adolescent inpatient hospital setting, residential treatment facility, continuation high school campus, juvenile probation and adolescent substance abuse treatment in Santa Clara County.

Born and raised in South Africa, she earned her B.A. in Psychology and African Languages at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and her M.A. in Psychology and Art Therapy at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. Her three college-aged children continue to challenge and teach her in ongoing learning and discovery, about being a mother and parent.

Shelly Gillan is the Director of Client Services at Kara, a center for grief support and education in Palo Alto. Ms. Gillan has been active in Kara since November 1994 as an adult peer counselor, assuming the role of Director in 2000. She has served as a member of Kara’s Crisis, Community Out Reach and Education Team since 1999. She works as a community consultant to local elementary, middle and high schools, which have experienced grief or sudden loss. At Kara, she has facilitated and supervised groups for teens, parents, adults and Kara counselors. Her background includes extensive experience with anticipatory death, life threatening illnesses, complicated grief involving suicide, homicide and parents grieving the death of a child. Ms. Gillan holds a BA in Psychology and Child Development and an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy.

Judi Hensley brings almost forty years of experience in Special Education to Lydian Academy. Ms. Hensley earned a BS in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, in 1967 and was a practicing speech therapist until she decided to get her MA in Deaf Education. Since earning her MA from San Francisco State University in 1975, she has worked with hearing-impaired students here in the Bay Area.

Ms. Hensley has extensive experience in working with all kinds of learners. With her credential to teach learning-handicapped, Ms. Hensley is qualified to teach not only the hearing-impaired, but students with any learning handicap. Ms. Hensley's classroom is always a mix of students with varied learning styles, and she is the rare hearing specialist who can bring in normal-hearing learners as role models for her hearing-impaired students. Ms. Hensley is currently the Hearing Specialist for the Cupertino Union School District.

Todd Rulon-Miller is currently President and CEO of KnowNow, Inc., a technology company in Santa Clara. Todd was former Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales & Services at Netscape Communications from its early beginnings to generating over $600M in sales, as well as a founding partner of the Apogee Venture Group. He has served on the Board of several technology companies, including Active Software (from start-up through its initial public offering on NASDAQ) and Oblix (acquired by Oracle Corporation).

Additionally, he served on the Marketing Advisory Board at Epiphany through its initial public offering on NASDAQ.

Todd also contributes his leadership and entrepreneurial expertise to various educational organizations, holding board of trustee positions at St. Paul School in Concord, New Hampshire and Eaglebrook School in Deerfield Mass.

Pat Robinson is a well-known educator in our community. She started her long and diverse educational career as a teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School District, where she taught for 30 years. Ms. Robinson continued her career as an educator and was hired by IBM, where she served as a developer of computer-based reading programs.

In addition to bringing a wealth of classroom experience, Ms. Robinson has led parent education and teacher training programs. She is also an expert in language development - she was one of five teachers featured in the California Department of Education film series: Fostering Language Development in Young Children.
Ms. Robinson is an active community volunteer and she has served on various school boards, including The Lake School and the Beechwood School.