This past Tuesday, the Santa Ana Board of Education approved for our current Director of Elementary Education, Bianca Barquin, to replace me as the next Assistant Superintendent of K12 Teaching and Learning as soon as I depart next month.  I’m incredibly excited about the selection.  I don’t know exactly how many years Bianca has been with Santa Ana Unified, but it is easily in the double digits.  She has been a site administrator, a director of Human Resources, and an absolutely essential member of our current Teaching & Learning team.  It’s a great choice and addition for the leadership team.

And now, I’m officially in lame duck status.  I remember back in January, immediately after I accepted the position as General Director of the Lincoln School in Costa Rica, both our interim superintendents and then our new superintendent expressed some concern that if I announced my departure too early, I might get cut out of the decision-making process or that people might start to ignore me.  It wasn’t really a warning at all, but rather genuine counsel that I should time my announcement thoughtfully.  In terms of district leadership, transition timelines tend to be on the shorter end – working for 6 months after formally accepting another position is not the norm.  I ended up announcing pretty quickly, and continually joked that I was eager to be disinvited from meetings, which somewhat disappointingly never happened.

In fact, with COVID-19 and all of the emergency response and planning, the work has only intensified.   The past 2 months have quickly become some the most pressing of my professional career.  There has been little time to reflect on past efforts or think much about winding down as a district employee.  We’ve simply been too busy for any of that.  On most days I get so caught up in my work that I forget we’re in the midst of packing up our house.

In that sense, I’m deeply grateful.  There is really nothing more fulfilling professionally then to be part of a hard-working, hard-charging team that is pushing one another to do some of the best work of their lives.  I’ve certainly felt that way this semester – and the work is far from over.   My educational services leadership team meets every single day, and for as much as I wish we could cut back on our meeting time, we seem to have a full agenda of discussions and daily decision points.  On most mornings we don’t get through everything.  Our broader cabinet team meets three times each week, and our 90 minutes together each time are stuffed.  As I find myself repeating, we’ve had to redesign practically every system across the district, to how we serve meals (over a million served since the physical closure) to how we take inventory to how we provide instruction and distribute learning materials.  It’s been a roller coaster of a semester.

I’ve stopped believing that things will slow down.  Perhaps people will start to quietly disengage after after graduation and with the onset of summer.  I kind of doubt it.  Just two weeks before school would normally be ending, we are formally launching an innovation and design team to rethink what school looks like in August.  Our team has been digging in to countless thought papers and design overviews to guide our thinking.  At a time when the normal school year cycle is winding down, it feels like we are just getting started.

And so begins the final push to departure.  I’m feeling energized, curious, and eager to keep pressing forward as we continue to move through such strange times in education.