District drama enters its third act

Sequoia’s Board of Trustees begins its search for a new superintendent

BY MATEO MANGOLINI Co-Feature Editor

The Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD) board of trustees is once again searching for a new superintendent, after Dr. Darnise Williams’ tenure in the position suddenly and inexplicably ended this past November.

The circumstances surrounding this development are rather unusual. Typically, superintendents spend years in their position, but the past two superintendents have only been in power for a year or two. Additionally, two secret meetings were held in the lead up to the termination of Williams’ position, by a board that had been elected only a week prior.

Despite the district’s assurance that such a development was a “mutual agreement”, mistrust and skepticism among elements of Sequoia’s teaching staff begged one question: Can faith in our board be restored? The board hopes that, through the search process, trust can once again be restored.

The Search

Though it is ultimately the board of trustee’s responsibility to choose a new superintendent to lead the district, the duty of finding eligible candidates for the position is traditionally outsourced to “search firms”. These are specialized agencies whose partners (senior members who also have partial ownership over the firm) are trained to be able to quickly and efficiently search for candidates to fill non-elected administrative roles in the district, especially that of a superintendent. After a round of public and board inquiry on Wednesday, January 22nd, Eric Andrew, a partner of one such firm, was tasked with establishing a pool of candidates for the position of superintendent.

“One of the things we want to do is to make sure we have a very detailed timeline and plan in place so that we can execute it without many deviations,” Andrew said. “It’s so that those [in the public] who are interested in the process can be a part of it.”

Andrew’s firm, known as Leadership Associates, is one of the larger search firms in California, with a reach extending both north and south of the San Francisco Bay Area. During the SUHSD’s last superintendent search, it was Andrews who found Williams, after the previous superintendent was removed in a vote of no confidence. Leadership Associates emphasizes the importance of finding a range of candidates to lead the district, something Andrew has had experience with.

“I pride myself in ensuring that any pool of candidates I bring forward is a diverse pool,so I make sure I go out looking for a diverse pool of candidates so that the board can see a variety of candidates that are very different,” Andrew said.

The timing of this search is promising, as the first few months of the year are what is known in Andrew’s line of work as “search season”. This is typically when firms conduct their search, a process that can take two to three months on average.

“Superintendents either announce their retirement or they decide they’re going to move to other districts, or in some cases, they’re being released somewhere between late December and early January. And so the search season is typically from January to June,” Andrew said.

Andrew is hopeful that Leadership Associates is able to mend some of the skepticism brought about by the irregularity of the situation.

“I think part of the act of rebuilding trust is one person at a time individually, and it takes time once it’s broken,” Andrews said.

Broken Trust

Despite these measures, elements of

SUHSD’s staff and administration still feel that there is a serious lack of transparency with the way the board of trustees governs itself. Of particular concern is the series of secret meetings held leading up to the end of Williams’ tenure.

“Will you as a team actually listen to your whole community? Or will you create your own political goals and desires,” Jenny Blum, a member of the district staff, said in a public comment.“Will you actually tell us [your aims] or hide behind the veil of secrecy that we have been waiting for you to come out from.”

Similarly, there are concerns surrounding what this series of events may mean for the district’s image. Losing two superintendents in quick succession may paint a picture of a district that isn’t particularly attractive to potential superintendents.

“Who’s going to come into a district where in the course of the last six years, they’ve gone through two superintendents and both of their contracts have ended with a mutual agreement?” co-leader of the SUHSD’s equity, diversity and inclusion partners Taja

Henderson said. “That could potentially be a barrier to the best candidates or candidates that we need in our district to come.”

The termination of Williams’ tenure is especially difficult for the SUHSD’s teachers of color. Williams, the first black female superintendent in the district, had been responsible for ensuring that initiatives that gave a microphone to underrepresented voices would materialize. The most notable of these initiatives was the Sequoia Equity and Inclusion partners, which seeks to eliminate racial bias in education throughout the district, root and stem.

“[Pablo Aguilera and I] created room for these councils to take form in schools across our district, but we felt that there was a disconnect in communication between what was happening with the schools and what was going on in our district office and so we felt that it was important to have someone come in and bridge the two,” Henderson said. “She supported it before we were even pushing for there to be someone [from the board] at the table.”

The circumstances of the “mutual agreement” leave more questions than answers for Sequoia’s teachers of color (TOC). Williams had shown substantial work experience in high schools around California, even within gargantuan districts such as the L.A. unified school district, serving over 500,000 students. Similarly, during the Dec. 19 meeting announcing the mutual agreement, no reason was given for this development, only that Williams had been incredibly helpful and well-received within the SUHSD. Stranger still, the mutual agreement stipulates that neither the board of trustees nor Williams can speak on the matter. That leaves teachers of color wondering, “why?” In school districts across the nation, prejudice against teachers of TOC by district administrations often happens in a covert fashion, and the level of secrecy cultivated by the board of trustees’ actions has not helped to quell the feeling that the SUHSD’s issues with diversity in its staff remain in an endless status quo.

“I’ve been in the district for 23 years, and what has changed? Nothing,” math teacher Adili Skilin said. “I hate to say that, but situations like this have happened multiple times.”

The SUHSD, though it boasts significant populations of Latino and Pacific Islander students (with 56% of students identifying as Latino at Sequoia High School alone), has had some communities more represented than others on its board of trustees. For instance, though East Palo Alto, a primarily Black, Pacific Islander and Latino community, has been within the district for nearly a century, the first board member from the town to be elected, Shawneece Stevenson, only received the position in the last five years.

“If you’ve had a district that’s been here so long and this is the first time we’ve actually had a board member from East Palo Alto… that’s enough said,” Skilin said . “I love my district and I love my school, don’t get it twisted. I can either be part of the problem or I can be part of the solution.”

Skilin, also an advisor for Sequoia High

School’s Black Student Union, has come together with other TOC to discuss the situation regarding Dr. Williams. Skilin describes the meeting as both a support group and a forum to discuss how to move forward.

“There were people coming to me who don’t ever talk to me saying ‘Skilin, what the hell is going on?’ … There’s a whole bunch of people asking that question. I thought ‘ let me get my core folks together and let me ask what they think,’” Skilin said. “What’s happened happened, and we’re not going back, and so [the question is] ‘what do we do moving forward?’”

Skilin repeated the opinion that a primary challenge when moving forward with the superintendent search is making inroads with Sequoia’s Black and Brown communities.

“Are [trustees] going out and calling folks or talking to them directly? No…Is [talking to folks] gonna take time? Yes it is, but there’s been a wound that has been created, you need to take the time,” Skilin said. “If you don’t know how to talk to folks, sometimes you come across as like you’re not being true even though you have been in reality. If you don’t want to talk to folks, you simply can’t relate to them.”

Of particular importance to Skilin is active listening on the part of Andrew’s firm and the board of trustees.

“[When talking to folks] you ask them, you don’t tell them,” Skilin said. “You don’t prescribe them, you don’t go in with an agenda.”

Still, despite these looming challenges, Skilin is determined to find a solution amid this search.

“ We have to find a solution, heal that wound.”