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 1^st 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 5^th 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 6^th (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.

If ever there were a concept that we cite regularly as educators, that we generally get wrong, “critical thinking” would certainly be a strong contender (“growth mindset” would be a strong runner up, but that’s a different blog post).  In fact, we espouse the virtues of “critical thinking” in a way that it has become synonymous with the idea of academic rigor – a general sense that students are thinking hard.  Yet critical thinking is much more than a strong workout for the brain, although it certainly is that too.  At the most superficial level, critical thinking involves the systematic analysis of evidence to form a position or judgement.  Most definitions push even further, suggesting that critical thinking should both explore bias and even adopt a skeptical perspective of any conclusions.  While we certainly like the “thinking” part of the definition, not all educators are comfortable with the “critical” part.  Openly skeptical students who consistently challenge our assumptions and perspectives are not always the most appreciated.

One of my dad’s favorite education stories to tell is about when, as a high school student, his favorite course textbook was called “viewpoints.”  I have never done historical research to get a clear sense of what this book was all about, but as my dad tells it, it was simply a book that emphasized how every perspective has a counter-perspective that deserves exploration.  As you might have guessed, the book caused enough controversy to get pulled from the curriculum.  The question of what perspectives should be taught in our schools has long been debated.

Two of the most potent curricular approaches to really encouraging critical thinking, in my opinion, are the International Baccalaureate program and Ethnic Studies.  In the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, all diploma candidates are required to take a course known as “Theory of Knowledge.”  Basically, it’s a course that helps students explore the question of “how do you know what you know?”  For many students, this is an uncomfortable line of reasoning, as they have never stepped outside of their own experience and perspective to reflect on  the development of their own worldview.  To some parents and communities, this can be perceived as dangerous, as it encourages young people to openly analyze their set of core beliefs and perspectives.  The “International” part is also sometimes called into question.  Many stateside students learn their ethics, history, and values within a national context and culture that does not always acknowledge the big world we live in with its countless perspectives and counter-perspectives.  While I believe this type of intellectual work can actually strengthen our commitment to key concepts like liberty and equity, it isn’t universally embraced.  Students who can articulate how they have come to believe and think as they do, and contrast it with alternative perspectives, strike me as much better prepared for success in our world of ideas.

I am also a big advocate of Ethnic Studies programs, which are also not without controversy.  Recently, our Board of Education passed a resolution that will ultimately result in Ethnic Studies becoming a graduation requirement for students in the Santa Ana Unified School District.  Over the past several years, our Teaching and Learning team has developed a scope and sequence curriculum and has offered Ethnic Studies courses in several of our secondary schools.  At the heart of Ethnic Studies is the analysis of how different ethnic and racial groups in the United States have struggled and worked together in pursuit of ideals such as justice, equality, liberty, and equal protection under the law.  It engages students in discussions about the ongoing balance between governance, authority, freedom, and collective action.  Ethnic Studies reminds students that societies and governments are deeply human things that reflect the collective and individual decisions of key actors and constituencies over time.  In other words, the civil society and rule of law that defines our American identity has been rife with conflict and competing interests, and that generally the voice of minority and marginalized communities in that process has been exactly that – marginalized.

Whether the course is IB Theory of Knowledge, Ethnic Studies, or even a U.S. History course, there is always a concern, on both sides of the political spectrum, that individual teachers will abuse their position of authority with young people, and push a personal political agenda.  Furthermore, it is perhaps naive to think that curriculum development isn’t always a political act, and that what is considered “acceptable” for the classroom is always being negotiated through broader public opinion and its related democratic processes.  Even so, the risk of not engaging students in true critical thinking is much more threatening to our democracy and education system than rogue teachers or errant curriculum committees.

Again, this critical analysis of our perspectives, values, and history is in essence part of what it means to participate in a democratic system.  It seems not only appropriate, but essential for our young people to learn how to do engage in that system.   If our real goal is developing the critical thinking of our students, then we need to trust them, and our teachers, to engage in critical thought and analysis.

I’m white, and grew up in suburban Mesa, Arizona.  A few years ago, I read an article in Forbes magazine that named Mesa the most conservative city in the United States.  At the time I read the article, I was the principal at an arts-focused high school in the city of San Francisco, the city which that same Forbes article declared as the most liberal U.S. city in the country.  Certainly, the distance between these two places in my life was much further than the 769 miles indicated on Google Maps.  As a child, I had attended schools whose students were predominately white, and almost all of my closest friends had been white as well.  As an adult educator and administrator, I found myself leading a school where nearly 100% of students were either African American or Hispanic.   

By the time I graduated from high school, I still did not have much of an equity discourse or an awareness of the racial disparities that exist in our country.  Of course I had taken classes at school that touched on matters of race, poverty, inequality, and discrimination.  Yet these issues primarily existed for me in a historical, academic space, very distant from my day to day interests and interactions.  I simply didn’t have the life experience to put things in their proper context.

When I turned 19, I left Arizona for South America on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  For the next two years of my life, I lived amongst the Spanish speaking citizenry of one of the poorest regions of Argentina.  The initial drive from the small regional airport to my apartment in the northeastern province of Chaco made it clear that I was about to confront an entirely different world.  As I struggled to learn Spanish and adjust to new foods and customs, an even deeper struggle was happening internally, where I was trying to make sense of the poverty that surrounded me on every side.  It was unlike anything I had seen or experienced in my life.  I quickly began to realize that the world was much, much bigger than Mesa, Arizona, and that the world was filled with a diversity of people and perspectives that I would no longer be able to ignore.  It was such a humbling experience for me, in fact, that I found myself asking a lot more questions and listening more intently to the ideas and experiences of others.  I fell in love with a country, a language, and a people that were not my own.

When I returned home, I attended Arizona State University and changed majors to secondary education and Spanish.  One of my first classes was a course called “Culture & Schooling,” perhaps my first real dive into the racial implications of public schooling in our country.  In one of the first lectures to our class, the professor asked students about whether they had personally experienced discrimination.  The first student to raise her hand told a story about how her trips to the grocery store typically involved being followed by a store employee who watched her shop, assuming that the brown color of her skin made her more likely to shoplift.  To be honest, I was a little confused as I had never had an experience like this myself.  Perhaps the professor sensed the incredulity of some members of our class, so he asked more broadly.  “How many of you are typically followed by a store employee when you go grocery shopping?”  Dozens more hands went up.  Again, I listened and learned, recognizing that my own background and perspectives represented a small fraction of the lived experience of those around me.

I have had countless moments like these over the past 20 years, too many to name, when my own ignorance or lack of personal experience has been enlightened by the courageous sharing and advocacy on the part of colleagues of color.  I am deeply indebted to these colleagues, from Mr. Love in Boston to Dr. D in San Francisco, to many others in the places I have lived and worked, for their lessons in leadership and solidarity with communities of color that inform my actions every single day.  I fully recognize how my position of privilege allows this tutoring to occur in the relative safety of a classroom or a private conversation.  But, at the very least – and it really isn’t much to ask – it started by being willing to listen.  I’ve had to shut up long enough to seriously consider the perspectives and experiences of those with very personal knowledge about racism and discrimination – a knowledge which has come to them at a very high cost indeed.

Throughout my life I have been a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  One of the distinguishing features of our church services is a monthly worship service we refer to as a “testimony meeting.”  These are meetings set aside for members of the congregation to come to the pulpit to publicly witness of their spiritual convictions and experiences.  “Bearing testimony” is common language amongst church members, referring to this simple yet deeply personal practice of sharing what is in our hearts.  Bearing testimony requires a willingness to be vulnerable with others.  In essence, it is an act of putting ourselves and our experiences “out there” for broader consideration.  We can only hope that those who hear us will be thoughtful and respectful in their reactions to what we have to say.

How long will it take for white America to listen when our black and brown brothers and sisters bear testimony of their lived experiences?  How many “driving while black” or “jogging while black” or “trying to open the front door to my own home while black” stories have to be told before we will listen.  Even more importantly, how many more of these stories must be told in order for us to change our belief systems or demand change in our society?  Admittedly, my own values in this regard have been changed and shaped over many years, and I am still far from the warrior for equity that I know I must be.  Yet imperfect though I may be, I can say without question that any progress in my journey has been dependent upon my willingness to listen when someone is bearing testimony to the impact of racism in his or her life.  When those stories come, don’t block out the message, and don’t turn away.  Turn to listen and let the power of their testimony stay with you.

I’ve come to recognize what is about to happen when I get a text that says something like “I need to connect with you all immediately following this meeting.”  Usually, it involves an announcement or situation that is likely to have a significant impact on the work.  I got one of those last week, when our Deputy Superintendent of Education Services, and my current boss, Alfonso Jimenez, called us together for a quick meeting.  After nearly 4 years of working together, Dr. Jimenez informed us he was offered the position as superintendent of Hacienda La Puente Unified School District.

Obviously, I’m excited for Dr. Jimenez, and since I’m in the process of transition myself, I couldn’t hold too serious a grudge for his decision to leave Santa Ana Unified.  As has become something of a tradition for me, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the ways in which Alfonso has influenced my own leadership and impacted the work of Santa Ana during his time with the district.

Emotional Intelligence

Alfonso is incredibly stable and centered.  Yes, I’ve seen him get animated on occasion, but it is never about him or how he has been treated.  It is always about the work and the quality of our commitment and service to students and families.  When the heat gets turned up, Alfonso stays calm and focused, and he never takes things personally.  In the context of a large urban school district, this leadership attribute is absolutely essential.  With major constituency groups all weighing in and pressing on decisions around resource allocation and provision of services, being able to calmly hear and consider multiple perspectives is a critical skill.   

Alfonso also doesn’t play favorites.  While he is very personable and enjoys strong relationships, he doesn’t play people off of one another.  For example, as Deputy Superintendent he supervises myself and my two Assistant Superintendent colleagues. We are an intensely passionate and opinionated trio as we strive to move the work forward, and Alfonso has managed to build relationships of trust with each of us and as a collective team.  Key to that work is an ability to keep confidences.  Even amongst his closest colleagues, Alfonso will let you know when he isn’t at liberty to discuss or share.  It takes an incredible amount of emotional intelligence to stay centered under such demanding circumstances.

Attention to Detail

Dr. Jimenez has a very keen eye for the details.  Whether he is reviewing a project plan, grant  submission, vendor contract, or update to members of the Governing Board, Alfonso does not miss anything.  We’re used to Alfonso pulling out his black notebook to review to-do items and follow up on anything that might have been missed.  On occasion, I will get a late-night email asking about the status of an item that he mentioned in passing the day or week previous.  For as much as I pride myself on being thorough and double-checking my work, Alfonso has saved me on a number of occasions when he caught a detail that would have made my life more problematic.  I’m constantly amazed at how closely he reads and reviews everything – I think that’s why the email reminders are coming late at night!

What is amazing about Alfonso’s attention to detail is that he never seems to micromanage.  I find his reminders and feedback incredibly helpful in elevating my own work and sense of follow-through.  He is able to empower my work while simultaneously holding me to high expectations for being thorough and complete.  He delivers his critical feedback in a straight-forward and non-judgmental manner.

Deeply Engaged

Alfonso has lived and breathed Santa Ana Unified during his time here.  He puts in long, demanding hours – and not necessarily because it is his preference but because the nature of the work often demands it.  He does this without complaint or drawing attention to himself.  He just consistently and patiently does what needs to be done.

This quality of personal engagement is particularly heightened in crisis situations, where Dr. Jimenez is absolutely solid.  He understands the need to both address the situation at hand but also attend to the simultaneous public relations and communications needs of the community.   It is no surprise to me that the board in Hacienda La Puente came to recognize that Alfonso has a wide range of experiences addressing challenging situations, of which he has personal and first-hand experience managing.  Of course he knows how to delegate – the volume of work that moves through his office can be staggering – but he also knows when not to delegate, and when the work needs his personal attention.

This past week, we launched our district Innovation Design Team (IDT), with the goal of bringing together a cross-functional team to infuse the planning process for reopening with a push for designing personalized, student-centered learning environments.  We are not satisfied simply with a reopening.  We want to ensure that the schools our students come back to are even better equipped to promote student learning and foster the social-emotional health of our learners.  The framework shared by the IDT facilitator team focuses on five key domains in the context of redesign:

Elicit Stakeholder Input & Feedback

As a community oriented educational organization, it is essential that our design process be as inclusive as possible to the voices and perspectives of our community.  This has been a clear priority of our board of education, and that desire for community input is a key element of our redesign work.  As a district, this past week we sent out a comprehensive survey to families to inquire as to their preferences and expectations with regards to different reopening scenarios.  At the same time, the superintendent launched his superintendent’s community advisory committee.  The role of the IDT is to ensure that survey data and community input drives the design decisions for August reopening and beyond.

Identify Critical Areas of Need

At times during the COVID crisis, the sheer breadth of decision-making and emergency response has felt overwhelming.  In many ways, we have already had to redesign entire systems of operations in a matter of days and weeks.  In the midst of so many areas that could merit our attention, it is essential that the IDT focus on those areas of most critical need.  This was the first order of the day last week when the team facilitated its first group meeting, taking time to sift through competing demands to identify those critical areas that will need our most focused attention and effort over the next few weeks.

Provide Recommendations

The IDT is not the system that carries out the work.  We already have a district full of departments and teams who are equipped to carry out the work of educating, feeding, and serving our students.  Rather, the role of the IDT as we have envisioned it is to engage in a series of “design sprints” – to systematically review health guidelines, legal frameworks, and best practices around the world, to provide solid recommendations to the departments and decision-making units of the district.  In other words, the IDT is design to build knowledge and capacity to carry out the highest-leverage practices that are out there.

Develop Systems (Logistical & Instructional)

If I have learned anything during my time in Santa Ana Unified, it is that in a large system, instructional innovation at the student level – the shifts towards more personalized, project-based and rigorous learning environments – is largely mitigated by the operational and logistical systems that run in the background.  From the recruitment and retention of talented staff, to the alignment of resources, to the procurement of key instructional materials and practices, to the systematic professional development of staff, to the student information system and grading software, instructional systems flow from logistical systems.  As Improvement Science so strongly suggests, these systems need to be carefully mapped and redesigned if new and better outcomes are to be realized.

Action Planning

Ultimately, the success of the IDT will be measured by the concrete actions that are taken up by the school system to improve and redesign the learning experience of our students.  With such an unprecedented opportunity and critical need for departments and teams to come together, the IDT must foster and encourage a collaborative spirit that is fiercely centered on equitable learning for all students in SAUSD.  The current crisis has and will continue to demand a lot of our staff, and we are confident that we can collectively rise to the challenge, through a community input and research driven process that results in timely recommendations and action at every level of the organization.

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.

I just read a piece put out by Transcend Education entitled “Responding, Recovering, and Reinventing.”  In a nutshell, the article presents these three Rs as a framework for addressing the COVID-19 crisis in schools.  I certainly have felt like the past 2 months have been an intense Response to an emergency crisis.  We’ve virtually redesigned an entire district system in a matter of weeks.  The Responding element of the framework very much rings true, and it has been a very heavy lift.

As for the Recovering, I’m not 100% sure when that is supposed to happen, or what that entirely means.  I think everyone is hopeful that the summer months will bring at least a measure of recovery time.  Perhaps the most difficult element of the Recovering mode is the question of how do you adequately recover when the short term time horizon is filled with so much uncertainty?  I think everyone is waiting to exhale and welcome some distant moment of predictability.  But that moment does not seem to be forthcoming.  Instead, our pivot to reinventing and planning for the future requires that we plan for multiple scenarios and contingencies, which of course demands a high level of organizational integration and collaboration.  Large systems struggle to produce a single coherent plan for meaningful student learning and fiscal solvency under typical conditions; planning for multiple scenarios simultaneously requires a capacity that is stretching everyone.

The article describes Recovery as a time for “recouping learning” and for “restoring community.”  We are actively pursuing both of these outcomes.  We redesigned our summer programs to include a robust “summer bridge” experience for our students that would address the most essential learning standards that were missed during the physical school closure.  The summer months also buy us some much needed time in our pursuit of an internet connectivity solution that will be robust enough to meet the long term needs of our students and community.  Our team of Family and Community Engagement workers have designed virtual town halls and school level community meetings, all with the goal of “restoring community” and bringing a sense of connection and support during a difficult time for many of our families.  We don’t yet entirely know the economic fallout for Santa Ana, but we have enough data and anecdotal stories to know that it is hitting hard.  Of course the Santa Ana ethic is and has always been to keep moving forward with faith in the future while seeking the benefits of hard work and education.  But still, times are difficult for many.

On a personal level, my family and I are preparing for a transition to Costa Rica, and so our recovery will be more of a reset.  Certainly it will not allow much time for physical or mental “recovery.”  Every spare moment right now is spent in making arrangments for our move.  We’ve sold our house, made living arrangements, and I’m checking in each week with the leadership team at the Lincoln School where I’ll be serving as General Director come July 1.  We’re incredibly excited about the opportunity to join the Lincoln family, although the uncertainty of when the airport in San Jose will reopen and whether we’ll actually be able to make the move on time has certainly been an ongoing source of some anxiety.  Of course, we consider ourselves tremendously blessed and recognize that in many ways, the entire world is passing through a universal moment of anxiety and difficulty.

I am very much energized to move on to the Reinventing part of the framework, but think it is important not to forget the healing and connecting that comes via time for Recovery.  For some, the impact of the physical closure has set back plans and dreams for the future, if at least temporarily.  I’m a deeply goal and task-oriented person, and the call for Recovery has been a good reminder that everyone needs some space to rest and heal in life after confronting a crisis.

While a lot of education thought leaders have been outlining the new possibilities for education now that virtual learning has, at least temporarily, gone mainstream, practitioners in schools have been wholly engrossed in emergency response and planning.  Every time someone eagerly announces that schooling will never be the same, I admittedly have to remind myself that the first order of the day is to address the very short term needs of students and school communities.  Graduations have been cancelled.  Legal frameworks for conducting business and providing mandatory services have been suspended by executive order.  Families who may have struggled to pay for services before find themselves even more stretched to address basic needs.  We’ve had to design emergency systems for food distribution and mental health services from scratch, and figure out ways to provide educational materials and device distributions while social distancing and without the benefit of universal internet access.   

Last week started to feel like a turning point for me and our educational team.  Over the course of a few days, our school governing board approved a grading policy for the Spring and Summer 2020 semesters.  We rolled out a series of guiding documents and program overviews, including our emergency remote learning continuity plan, our graduation plan, our revised summer school plans, and a plan to address timing and return of inventory (textbooks, digital devices, instruments, etc.).  Our tech team has introduced a system for families to get repairs on devices.  Our food distribution team has provided hundreds of thousands of meals to the community.  We instituted a system for careful consideration of requests for leadership teams to access campuses to conduct essential tasks as we figure out the safest way to close school for 2019-20.  Our communications team launched a major initiative to celebrate and recognize our seniors whose culminating semester looks unlike any of the past 75 years.

Admittedly, the last quarter of school this year was a herculean effort that is most accurately described as an emergency response.  It reflects the best that we could hope for and attain given the circumstances.  We even changed the name of our educational overview from a “distance learning plan” to an “emergency remote learning continuity plan.”  Perhaps a technical difference, but one that reflects our belief that a true digital learning experience can and must be more than what we were able to provide given the immediacy of the physical closure of schools in March.

So now, while we run one of the largest organizations in Orange County, we will simultaneously turn our attention to the strategic questions of providing a meaningful and rigorous education come Fall 2020.  We’ve already begun the planning, and members of our respective district and school leadership teams are looking carefully at the different models and structures that might prove most effective.  We’ve identified examples of best practices within our own district team, as well as begun curation of instructional practices and programs outside the organization that have proven most promising.  We are mobilizing to provide universal internet access, despite significant structural challenges.  We’re scenario and contingency planning for what school should look like, given different guidelines that might come at the state and national level.  We’re planning to hit a moving target, and that will require all of us to build skills and leadership capacity that we may not have possessed before.

I’m incredibly proud of the work our Santa Ana team has done to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.  But our work is far from done.  If we are to deliver on our mission to prepare every student for college and career success, then we’ve only set a foundation for the work that will need to unfold in the coming months.  It’s a historic opportunity to move from unexpected tragedy to building something better for our students and community in the long term.

Friday morning, I had the chance to participate in a discussion about best practices in distance learning put on by UC Irvine.  I signed up hoping to pause from the day to day business and decision-making that has engulfed our leadership team.  The goal was to listen and learn from teachers actually doing the work of teaching kids during this time of physical school closure.  It was the best 60 minutes of my week.

The interaction started off with an open discussion about what we were each doing to engage students via virtual platforms.  When the moderator put us in separate Zoom breakout rooms, I quickly realized that amongst the 7-8 people in our group, 3 of them were Santa Ana Unified teachers.  I always feel a little bad for the teachers in my group who get stuck with the assistant superintendent in their discussion, but these women were gracious and forthright in sharing both their triumphs and challenges at the student level.

Perhaps what suprised me most was that all 3 of the teachers reported 100% of their students connecting with their classes virtually.  In a district where we know at least 10% and perhaps upwards of 30% of students are struggling to connect virtually, this was a welcome report.  I was amazed to hear about the teachers’ collective wilingness to jump into the digital world, exploring a variety of platforms and supplemental programs.  All three of the teachers were elementary level.  For video calls, two of them used our Google Classroom platform while one had decided that Zoom was working much better for classroom facilitation.  Each also supplemented communication with a secondary interactive exchange platform, whether that be via ClassDojo or FlipGrid, while others posted directly via Google Classroom.  In addition, the teachers reported a variety of content delivery platforms that supplemented the experience.

What I enjoyed learning about the most were the different strategies the teachers were using to encourage engagement and interaction.  From Spirit Days do time each video session introducing siblings, pets, and favorite toys.  The teachers were all united in describing the challenges of overcoming ongoing distractions and how to balance students’ natural enthusiasm for catching up with friends with the need to engage in academic content.  These teachers were upbeat and enthusiastic, while also seeming a little worn out from all of the quick shifts and online calls.  The fact that they snuck in time for some professional learning and sharing with colleagues was particularly impressive to me.

Of course we know that there is variety in the quality of the experience that our students are having now that learning has moved into the digital space, this brief interaction left me feeling hopeful that students and teachers alike are making meaningful strides in navigating a fully digital learning world.  While we all miss the in-person interaction, our teachers and students are certainly doing incredible things with the difficult hand they have been dealt.

When our new superintendent Jerry Almendarez arrived in Santa Ana just over 3 months ago, one of the first things he did was hand each of the governing board and executive cabinet members a book.  In this case, he handed us each a copy of The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni.  Jerry didn’t just encourage his cabinet members to read.  He assigned it to us, reminding us that the first thing on the agenda during our upcoming executive cabinet meeting would be a discussion of the first two chapters of the book.  Come prepared.   

When our cabinet meeting came around, we all sat around the large table in Jerry’s office, interested to hear what he would have to say as he formally launched his tenure as superintendent.   Behind him, on the long bookshelf that runs along the window, there were perhaps two dozen books.  They weren’t stacked like books are normally stacked on a bookshelf.  Each one was face-up, carefully placed and easy to read the cover.  Then the meeting began.  With almost every short conversation, Jerry would say something like, “that is a great point, it reminds me of this great book…”  As he explained the connection to a favorite book, he would stand up and move towards his bookshelf, find the book he was looking for, and eagerly pick it up and show it to us – inviting us to take a read for ourselves.  You know, in our free time.  These weren’t just book recommendations from Jerry.  It was like he was introducing us to his oldest friends.  People we would want to get to know.

When we gathered for our first meeting with all of the principals around the district, Jerry brought some of his favorite books with him.  Just like in our cabinet meetings, many topics of discussion generated spontaneous book recommendations.  Personalized instruction, yep, we’re going to be reading about that.  Building momentum in a complex organization, definitely got a book to help us there.  Guess what everyone, Voxer book club!  We can talk about books together even when we aren’t physically together.  When Jerry passed out copies of an upcoming shared read, it felt like we were all on the Oprah show.  “A book for you!  And a book for you!   Everybody gets a book!”

Now don’t get me wrong.  I love to read.  I would even identify myself as an avid reader.  I’m constantly challenging myself to keep reading, and have a long standing goal of reading a book each month.  Each year, I too engage my division leadership team members in a shared read and discussion.  But this was different.  Jerry’s enthusiasm for reading is at a whole different level.  As a former missionary, I know something about proselytizing, and Jerry is a straight up book evangelist.

Importantly, there was a corresponding message along with Jerry’s enthusiasm for reading.  That message has been clear and consistent since the day he began his leadership tenure in Santa Ana.  “We have to build the capacity of our team.”  “We have to grow leadership from within.”  “We have to help people learn to do things they don’t yet know how to do.”  His invitation to push ourselves to learn and grow has been particularly prescient given our current situation as a district, nation and world as we confront the ravages of COVID-19.  Jerry’s urgency, if anything, has grown.  We have to transform ourselves, our systems, our practices if we want to survive and thrive as an organization – and we have to make the pivot thoughtfully and quickly.  And then, of course, he had a book for that too.

To be honest, with six kids at home and a demanding job, reading had slowly become a bit more of a luxury.  When things got busy, which they always do, taking a few quiet moments with a book was often one of the first things crowded off the essentials list.  But then Jerry helped me reframe my priorities – and suddenly I have found myself taking 15 minutes during the day to read a chapter, or a chapter at lunch, or a longer read before bed.  Since finishing that first read together as a cabinet, I’ve read over a dozen additional books.  Some for work, but some for myself.  It’s been a real gift.