About Sean

Sean Frame lives in unincorporated Sacramento County with his wife Ellyn, in the house she grew up in. He is a union education worker, a dad, and a grandfather. 

Sean was called to lead on education after his son's principal was shot and killed during the school day. He helped the school community heal, then was elected to the school board and served nine years. He put his values to work by delivering broadband, supporting students and families facing housing insecurity, and starting a dual language immersion program for English learners. Ten percent of students in his district were housing insecure. Nine years also taught him how school money behaves once it leaves the state budget, and how little of it reaches a classroom. 

Sean already knew what housing insecurity looked like. As he was starting his family, his father was facing serious mental health challenges and ended up living on the street. Sean did what he could, and then had to face a decision he could not avoid. He could not give his children a healthy home with his dad under the same roof. That is why Sean does not discuss homelessness in the abstract. A shelter bed keeps a person alive. It does not let them stop worrying about where they will be next. People can start dealing with why they ended up on the street once they have a place that is theirs, which means California has to build that housing and fund the services that keep people in it. 

Sean spent much of his career running a small business as a filmmaker, and later applied those skills to education, creating training and materials for educators who provide testing to English learners and students with disabilities at the Sacramento County Office of Education. He has stood in solidarity with UNITE HERE casino workers, supported unionization at Siemens, and walked picket lines with unions across the region. He now serves as Chief Job Steward at CSEA 480, where he sits at the negotiating table with his fellow SCOE workers advocating for wages, healthcare, and working conditions for the custodians, cooks, paraeducators, and school staff a school cannot open without. 

A few years ago Sean noticed a spot on his arm. His doctor told him to ignore it. Sean asked again, and kept asking, until he got the referral, and the dermatologist found a melanoma. Aggressive surgery made him cancer free. It also showed him the shape of the problem. There is no ceiling on what a person will pay to save their own life or the life of someone they love, and a market organized around that number keeps moving toward it. Sean supports a California single payer plan because it puts a straight line between the people paying for care and the people providing it. 

Across all of it, Sean has met California's systems to the point where they stop being policy and become somebody's actual week. That is the standard he would take to the Senate. A person

who works in this district should be able to afford a home here, get care here, educate their children here, and stay in the community where they built their life. 

Sean's two adult sons are proud graduates of California public schools, one from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and one currently a graduate student there. The most recent addition to the Frame family is a grandson. He earned his undergraduate degree at San Jose State and a graduate degree at San Francisco State.