My recently promoted boss, Dr. Alfonso Jimenez, often joked with me about the stories I was waiting to publish on my blog after I left the district. While I certainly have some good stories (and, admittedly, a few scars), SAUSD has been very good to me. I have nothing but respect for those who have given a portion of their lives to the education of our children – from the governing board all the way to the classified staff whose daily work and sacrifices often go unheralded. Educating nearly 50,000 young people, feeding families, keeping campuses safe, providing critical services and supports, and in the case of Santa Ana, being the top employer in the city, requires a tremendous amount of skilled management and inspired leadership. It’s been an honor to be a part of that work and part of the SAUSD team.
5 years ago, we crammed everything we owned into a U-haul truck, and drove out of San Francisco. We rolled into Orange County, staying in a hotel room for a couple of weeks, while the U-haul and all our belongings sat in the parking lot. I started my new job as the Executive Director of School Renewal for SAUSD, charged to help reinvent and reinvigorate our portfolio of school choices for students and families, and to encourage and develop a more flexible and innovative culture amongst our team. I started my blog that week. I created a Twitter account. I took our oldest son Micah to urgent care when the intrepid 5 year old tried doing a front flip into the hotel pool and hit his head on the deck. Lynzie and I sat exhausted at the end of each day, tip-toeing around the dual pack-n-plays set up in the hotel room that held our not even 1-year old twins.
As days turned into weeks and months, our transient life started to settle into much needed routines. We moved into our house on Towner street. Our oldest two kids began kinder and 1st grade in the dual immersion program at King Elementary, which sits in the heart of Santa Ana near the intersection at Bristol and McFadden. My goal was to visit every school in the first semester, and I soon found myself riding my bike through the streets of the city, getting familiar with the homes, alleyways, small businesses and cornerstores, and the schools that all help define the city. Every day, at school beginning and school end, the streets and sidewalks would bulge with humanity as students and parents (mostly moms) would make the daily trek to and from school. I connected with some of the most innovative thinkers and boundary pushers in the district, and explored as many santanero owned restaurants, community organizations, and local businesses as I possibly could.
Within 6 months, I felt I was in the thick of things. We were supporting some bold program and school design initiatives – from our XQ super school design team to an Arts Conservatory to a new IB program to a fledgling district dependent charter school. We held massive student LCAP sessions at every high school, welcoming 300 students at each site into the gym for a morning of some of the most student-centered dialogue that I had seen happen between school leaders and students. We were redesigning teacher evaluation, encouraging technology integration and access, and encouraging the system to embrace the need to learn deeply. When I wasn’t working, I was enjoying life at home with our family. We explored Santa Ana and Orange County at every opportunity. At church, I had been asked to teach early morning seminary, and spent every morning at 5:45 am with 20 sophomores learning about the Old Testament. While never an easy assignment, early morning seminary provided me the opportunity to teach every day – something I still deeply love to do.
I can honestly say that those first years in SAUSD were some of my most rewarding professionally, in the sense that I was able to draw on what I considered to be my professional strengths – community-building, school redesign, personalized learning, & team development. I was given the space to pursue creative solutions to the very real challenges of declining enrollment, stalled academic growth, and aging instructional practices and infrastructure. I finished my doctorate at Berkeley and we welcomed our 5th child to our home.
The second half of my time at SAUSD was equally rewarding, albeit more challenging. From the day I was appointed to the executive cabinet as the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching & Learning, the volume of work for which I was responsible multiplied at a breathtaking pace. I often told people that I had two jobs. During the day, I was a district leader trying to visit schools, build team capacity, coordinate ongoing work, move forward strategic initiatives, and generally try to inspire ever increasing commitment to the success of our students. At night, I became a legal consultant, reviewing contracts, preparing board items, updating policy and administrative regulations, approving (and sometimes denying) purchase orders and contract requests, and answering the countless, never-ending, soul crushing mass of emails. My days began before the sun went up and ended long after the sun had gone down.
They say that fire is a great refiner, and that has been my experience as a member of executive cabinet. Every action, every plan, and every communication has been open to critique. Sometimes it has felt as if nothing moves fast enough, and yet everything moves too quickly. These challenges are just the price of admission – to say nothing of the leadership required to transform practices, systems, attitudes, and outcomes.
Despite the challenges – or more accurately, because of them – I feel like my time as the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning has been a great teacher. I like to tell people know that I didn’t really understand how the world worked until I joined the SAUSD cabinet. I learned how the push and pull of different constituency groups, authority figures, and fellow institutions and organizations shape what we call society. I learned about budgets and liability and lawsuits and jurisdictions and development in a contextualized way you simply cannot understand without experiencing them. I gained a new perspective.
For all I gained and all the learning, I also worked every day in hopes of making a transformational difference. I wanted, above everything else, for our schools to move closer to being real positive game-changers for every student. I wanted schools our students and families would openly acknowledge as having changed the trajectory of their lives for the better. I’m very proud of the work we moved forward – but am also aware that there is still so much to do. The past few years have seen the redesign of both teacher and site leader evaluation systems, the adoption and implementation of new ELA and Math curriculum (with Social Studies happening right now), the creation of a new goal-setting and accountability system, new dual immersion programs, the launch of an XQ super school, the implementation of a long-awaited professional development tracking system, the bolstering of preschool seats and early education, and many other initiatives and redesign tasks. On the home front, we welcomed our 6th (and final) child into the family. Our oldest kids finished 5 years at King Elementary (thank you to the amazing staff for the incredible time together). Now we are about to embark on a family adventure and professional opportunity that has been more than a decade in planning.
While I believed it long before I came to SAUSD, my time here has only reinforced and deepened my belief that what really matters in any organization are the people. Bring together and build the capacity of hard-working, talented people, and you can change the world. I have taken even greater interest in the great humans of our time and our past history, as I have an even deeper appreciation for just how hard it is to truly lead with vision, to truly challenge the status quo, and to truly transform outcomes. I have met many of those types of humans in my life, and many of them work and live right here in Santa Ana. Thank you for letting me be a part of that work.