Part 2 (the following builds on the data regarding teacher ethnicity in Sonoma County and how school and district leadership continues to be challenged by a lack of diversity)
In the summer of 2020, I read an update from Superintendent Socorro Shiels from Sonoma Valley USD. It was different from the usual superintendent letter because she mentioned James Baldwin right up front. She called for the school community to address systemic racism, asking that we put teeth in Baldwin’s quote:
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Baldwin is a personal hero of mine, both as a writer/poet and as an observer of the Civil Rights movement in America. He is fascinating because he is sometimes neglected in the 21st century. Unlike Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, or Dr. King, he was not assassinated, not martyred. And so his sometimes blistering words of critique of the white establishment are occasionally buried in time. He was also not a joiner, preferring to observe, write and speak about injustice rather than direct protest. He did not join the NAACP, for example, and spent most of his life in France, away from the turmoil in America.
Shiels’s letter impressed and motivated me. As we prepared to start school in the fall of 2020, America was in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. The deaths of Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd in May among others had galvanized America. It just didn’t feel like we could start the school year without directly addressing the movement and the issues at stake. So I met with two other teachers of our freshman elective (Success 101). (The class is designed as a foundation for the 9th grader to pivot as she/he/they moves through the high school experience. Students explore themselves at 14 years of age, reflecting on who they are and what they imagine for their futures. We look at career paths, college options, motivation, community service, and much more.) We decided to start the year with James Baldwin and his thoughts on civil rights in America. We found clips of Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show, in debate at Harvard, and in the brilliant Oscar winning film directed by Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro.
We were Zooming, of course, and the students were in gentle shock. Their 8th grade year had been cut off in person in March and here they were starting high school remotely. Still, their response to the Baldwin material was remarkable. His words stirred conversation and placed the BLM movement in a context that made sense for these students.
Then, in November, Shiels resigned or was fired from Sonoma Valley. I am not privy to what happened or why she was let go. But there went a Latina superintendent.
In January of 2021, Superintendent Diann Kitamura of Santa Rosa City Schools made a bold proclamation. “SRCS will be ready to open March 1. Whether we can or not is dependent upon this virus,“ she said. ”I want to assure parents, teachers, and the community, we will be ready. We are going to continue the hard work to be ready March 1 and the moment this virus becomes under control, if that is even a way to put it, we’ll open school.” But by mid-February, it was clear that March 1st was too optimistic. Getting everybody in line on general agreements to reopen, including the teachers’ union, proved a challenge. It wasn’t until April that a hybrid approach brought some kids back to the physical classroom in Santa Rosa.
During this time, in early February, Kitamura announced her retirement, effective the end of the school year. There is nothing linking her retirement to the difficulty in reopening schools. But one can imagine the frustration and difficulty that the 2020-2021 school year has brought to school leaders. As she said at the time of her retirement announcement, “It’s an impossible situation that superintendents have been placed in and it’s taking away from what I love to do, which is teaching and educating,” she said. “We have been placed in situations to make medical decisions … and it’s just not fair.” And so in June, Kitamura will step away from the Santa Rosa superintendency.
So where do we stand now? There are 40 school districts in Sonoma County with 38 superintendents. (Two are joint districts separating elementary from secondary – Petaluma and Santa Rosa – that have one superintendent for both). Of these 38 superintendents at the start of the 2020-21 year, only four were non-white, to the best of my knowledge. Shiels is already out and Kitamura will leave in June, leaving only two: Dr. Mayra Perez (Cotati-Rohnert Park) and Dr. Sonjia Lowery (Old Adobe Union).
Perez and Lowery are both first year superintendents, challenged as have all school leaders by Covid, Distance Learning and by the unique hurdles presented by the 2020-21 school year. I interviewed both Perez and Lowery to dig a little deeper into the question of ethnicity and school leadership, asking general questions about their onboarding, Covid implications, and their perceptions of race and educational leadership in Sonoma County.
Dr. Perez at Cotati-Rohnert Park previously worked at the San Rafael Schools district office as a deputy superintendent. She has risen to the challenge of the year of Covid but admits it has been “one of the most difficult years in my career.”
“I’m here to focus on student achievement, particularly with our most vulnerable students and instead, I’m doing crisis management,” she said.
Dr. Lowery at Old Adobe Union in Petaluma most recently served as assistant superintendent for educational services at Elk Grove School District. Like Perez, she has endured the trial by fire of Covid, attempting the difficult dance of serving all students and staff while keeping everyone safe, happy and well paid. Lowery says she took the job in Petaluma partly to serve as a role model for others. “It is a big deal, being the first black superintendent in Petaluma. I actually turned down another job at a higher salary because I thought I should have this job because of all the little black girls in Oakland where I grew up.”
In her first year, she has tried to stay focused on her primary goal of equity. “I think I am carrying on with my normal warrior equity work, and trying to really encapsulate all that I’ve learned about leadership and social justice to apply to this context. We have to move from awareness to advocacy to action in this work. It’s a process but it is all about what we value and we believe.”
Both Perez and Lowery have dealt with interesting perceptions regarding their intent. In a year where safety due to Covid has taken center stage, equity work has been back-burnered to some extent. In early 2021, for instance, Lowery wrote an op-ed after the January 6th Capitol events. She found the community’s response fascinating:
“The theme of the (op-ed) article was about how educators really have to lead the charge in talking to kids about what’s happening as history unfolds before our eyes. But what I got in response from parents and community members was, just focus on opening schools, stop sending us these op-ed pieces. Nobody was talking about this stuff when Black Lives Matter was protesting last year, and the underlying theme to those responses for me was be quiet, little black girl. Who are you to tell us?”
Lowery has sensed that kind of response before. She described her reception in Petaluma as “duplicitous.”
“On one hand,” she said, “I have experienced a lot of warmth and on the other hand, there are nuances to how people are perceiving my leadership or decisions that are happening. I think a lot of those things are racially charged even though people don’t want to admit to that. But I know what I’m experiencing because I’ve experienced it my whole career in leadership.”
Perez has encountered similar challenges and experiences navigating a largely white leadership system in schools. “I code switch all the time. I can speak “white” very well and then when I’m at home, I’m Latina. That code switching is something you have to navigate. I’ve taught families who are flipping out about something (that has happened in school to their child) and I teach them how to navigate the system. This is what you do. You go here, you speak calmly, here is what you say. I think we have a system that’s built on whiteness, if the majority of the teachers and the majority of administrators are white, I need to learn how to reach them. My family was really good about teaching me how to be white.”
Both Perez and Lowery are interested in hiring excellent people who can change the white majority paradigm in Sonoma County. “It’s really interesting,” Perez said. “This (imbalance in staff) is quite typical and yet it was easier to recruit LatinX teachers in Southern California than Marin.” Perez points out that in some cases, we don’t have a lot of bilingual staff. When she started at the Cotati Rohnert Park district office, there was only bilingual staff member in the district office. “And then that person (a receptionist) took another job so it was me, the superintendent, doing the translating. So we’ve worked on that.”
Perez also spoke about hiring staff in general. “When you’re LatinX, you look for that (when hiring), and I don’t know if everyone thinks about that.” She points out that the job description needs to clearly identify need – bilingual, biliterate, etc. “In San Rafael, we started to do that – we were designing job descriptions. For me, if you say we’re looking for dual language teachers, that’s much more enticing than we want you to be Spanish.” She underlines the Importance of valuing bilingualism. “We need to create our own pipeline, we need to go into the high schools and encourage LatinX students, then (figure out) how to mentor them and coach them. …How do we build that pipeline?”
Like Perez, Lowery is looking for ways to add diversity through the hiring process. “I’ve explored this question in three other systems. Some of the solutions are, first, we need to leave that old adage that they (LatinX) are not applying at the door. We have to be intentional about recruitment. We have to go to the places where people of color are and recruit them.” For example, Lowery said, we need to hold hiring fairs in communities where people of color live and have the vision to bring them here to Petaluma.
Lowery also knows it is important to connect with other city and community leaders like the mayor, police chief, city manager and other civic leaders. “It’s important for them to see people of color in leadership positions. Joining city task forces. Try(ing) to tap into people of color in the community to become a part of a cohort of leaders who move this forward.”
Perez also senses that permanent change in hiring diversity is a hard thing to sustain. “When I was in San Gabriel (before working at San Rafael), I was part of the most diverse cabinet, the assistant superintendent was Latina, I was Latina, the executive assistant was Latina, and the superintendent was Asian. And that cabinet has been broken up. We’ve all moved on and they’ve replaced the team with primarily white men. You watch it and you say, Why was this team broken up? What is it? It’s possible we made people uncomfortable.”
That discomfort is precisely what leaders like Perez and Lowery bring to school systems here. They both recognize a business-as-usual, clubby kind of leadership that needs addressing. “At one point in San Rafael,” Perez said, “I had someone at a training say to me, I don’t want to talk about your race, I want to get to know you. And I said, well, you need to see me. You need to see my color because I identify that way. So I brought in race training. I was uncomfortable, so was the superintendent. I mean, everyone in the room was uncomfortable, and there were these awkward silences, but if we can’t have the conversation, we can’t move forward. “
Of course, Perez says, there are also gender issues to deal with in Sonoma County. “There is still the good ol’ boys club, not just here and in Marin quite frankly, but everywhere. There’s an author who says racism is like smog – you don’t see that you’re breathing it. Well, the gender stuff is prevalent here too. I’ve had men of color as well as white men really not want to have a brown boss. There is a banter connection. Gender has more of a role to play. As these women retire (Kitamura and others), who’s going to come in? It’s a different way of being.”
To be clear from my perspective, all school leaders face increasing challenges. I don’t personally know how well Perez or Lowery are performing in their leadership roles. Balancing Covid safety with learning expectations, salary negotiations, and Distance Learning would challenge any superintendent, and certainly first year superintendents. What is clear from their words is that the burden of proof in being a strong leader is heavier for them than for their white peers.
NEXT STEPS:
Our collective next step is to ask these questions:
- How will Sonoma County districts address hiring in the short term i.e. replacing superintendent vacancies for 2021-22?
- How does Sonoma County address the issue of teacher ethnicity? Is there more that can be done to encourage young LatinX students to consider teaching as a profession? Should school districts here do as Lowery suggests, go further afield to find LatinX leadership talent and bring them to Sonoma County rather than simply checking EdJoin (the hiring portal) to see who applied?
- Does local control of school districts inhibit a more general hiring process? Since each board of a school district is responsible for hiring the next superintendent, does this make it more difficult to hire diverse leaders? Should the Sonoma County Office of Education (and the county superintendent) play a larger role in encouraging school leader diversity?
- Do we need to deepen the kind of training in implicit bias that many white school leaders carry as their own burden? I can recall examples in my own past practice as a school leader where decisions I made were based on out-dated perceptions.
- Can we legitimately build the case that students of color are suffering their own burden of learning partially because current school leaders do not fully embrace and empathize with them? Where do we find the proof?
There are more questions than these and each answer leads to another set. But I’m confident that we can alter this paradigm with the right mixture of inquiry and pressure.
As we were signing off our interview, Dr. Perez told me a short story about her own teaching. It underlines the above discussion and reminds us that it is just not OK to let things be:
“When I was in the classroom as a student, it was about Dick, Jane and Spot, and they didn’t look anything like me. And I didn’t see me in my teachers either.” So when she had the chance, she said, she brought in writers like Reyna Grande (The Distance Between Us). “Students need to see role models, and if we don’t have the staff (yet), we need to bring role models into schools, hey listen, there are authors like Reyna. She says to them: I’m an author because I came to this country. If I had stayed in Mexico, I would have been working for someone, but now I have a voice.”
(A future post will break down leadership shifts for 2021-22 in Sonoma County – has anything changed?
National Data on Superintendents:
While the racial and ethnic diversity of districts in which superintendents work has increased in recent decades, new numbers from AASA, The School Superintendents Association, suggest the nation’s superintendents are still overwhelmingly white and male despite gradual shifts in demographics.
The percentage of female superintendents increased slightly in the past decade, from 24.1% in 2010 to 26.68% in 2020 — more than double the percentage of female superintendents documented in 2000 (13.1%).
The number of superintendents of color is increasing much more slowly, with 8.6% of respondents identifying as superintendents of color in 2020, compared to 6% in 2010 and 5% in 2000. Of the relatively small percentage who are African American, LatinX or other minority groups, nearly 42% are women.
David Stirrat 