Education Week - June 9, 2021 - 10

A Lauded Superintendent Retires After
Years of Crises: 'I Don't Want to Become Bitter'
By Stephen Sawchuk
When asked what's been challenging
about leading the Santa Rosa City
Schools in California over her fiveand-a-half
year tenure, Superintendent
Diann Kitamura can tick them off easily,
one by one: Tubbs. Glass. Kincade.
Those are the names of the wildfires
that rampaged through her district,
destroying more than 800 students'
and staff members' homes.
Asked about the challenges of leading
through the 16-month stretch of
the pandemic, she names the alphabet
soup of federal and state health, education,
labor, and occupational safety
agencies whose conflicting and rapidly
evolving guidance have shaped
and sometimes constrained her ability
to respond: the CDC, the CDPH, the
CDE, OSHA, and the SRTA.
" Navigating politics when we have
no say over what happens-that has
just been a really horrible position to
be in, " Kitamura said in a series of
interviews earlier this month. " We're
selected to be leaders in a situation,
and in an organization, where we have
been stripped of our decisionmaking
powers. And leadership is really all
about those strategic decisions. "
At 62, Kitamura will leave the job
June 30, one leader among what
seems to be a growing exodus of superintendents
nationwide. Her primary
reason for leaving the job is to
take care of her elderly mother-a
responsibility tinged with new urgency
due to the rise in anti-Asian
violence-but she cites the maelstrom
of pandemic-related drama
right behind it.
Signs point towards more
leadership retirements this year
The retirements are coming at a
critical time. The imminent crisis of
COVID-19 is winding down, but new
challenges, like uncertain student
enrollments and the responsibility of
spending a once-in-a-lifetime infusion
of federal cash are emerging.
Kitamura's departure is, observers
say, a loss for the district and for California's
Sonoma County in general.
And more than that, it is a harbinger
of what could be a major shift in the
composition of the superintendency
over the next few years.
" Part of the crux here is in this moment
where we've seen incredible
volatility, complexity, ambiguity, I
think there is an unstated expectation
from communities, " said Steven Herrington,
the elected Sonoma County
superintendent, who provides financial
oversight of the 40 districts in the
county. " They look to the leader to be
the hero to save the day and have the
answers. In this environment we're
navigating, there are no right answers.
And there is a whole other set of leadership
capabilities leaders will need to
navigate this. "
superintendent job, and became the
superintendent in 2016.
In the K-12 universe, the term
" equity " is now used so frequently
that it's potentially in danger of becoming
meaningless, but there is no
question that Kitamura has the track
record to claim it as her legacy.
All students must now take the challenging
A-G coursework sequence
needed for entry into the University of
California, the state's top-tier public
university system, rather than being
tracked into low-level classes. The
district's Integrated Wellness Center,
set up in the wake of the Tubbs fire,
provides free counseling and social
services to students and their families.
But it's the smaller details that add
National talent search firms that
specialize in superintendents are
saying that they are fielding larger
numbers of RFPs than usual for the
superintendency. At least a portion of
that, they say, is due to talented leaders
who, like Kitamura, are finally
pressing the gas pedal on retirement
now that signs of recovery from the
pandemic are on the horizon.
Benchmark figures of superintendent
turnover are difficult to come by,
but at least one hiring expert suggests
the figure could be as high as 4,000 to
5,000 more than usual-about a third
of the national force.
Strikingly, the leaders of the nation's
three largest school districts-Los Angeles,
New York City, and Chicago-
have announced their departures
within weeks of one another.
The reasons are not surprising, the
hiring experts say: burnout, exhaustion,
frustration.
In Sonoma County alone, an unusual
number of crises from the wildfires
to power outages and floods has
contributed to a pattern of between
nine to 12 superintendents out of 40
leaving in each of the last few years,
or roughly 20 to 30 percent annually.
Kitamura's story resonates in this
context, because she is the kind of
leader that most school boards are
desperate to find, hire, and retain.
She has experience in nearly every
position in school leadership, from
teacher to counselor to administration-a
trait that's much less common
in these days of career-changing programs.
She has made tangible strides
to provide students of color with
equal access to strong teaching and is
lauded for her communications prowess,
two of the qualities recruiters say
are most in demand.
She has successfully remade her
district's relationship with the city's
teachers' union into a collaborative
10 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 9, 2021 | www.edweek.org
one. And she is an Asian-American
woman leader in a field where the top
job is still dominated by white men.
Equity front and center, in large
ways and small
Born in Yuba City, Calif., north of
Sacramento, Kitamura is a fourthgeneration
Japanese American. But
she knows a lot about what it feels like
to be treated like an outsider in one's
own country, an insight that underpins
her approach to the top school
leadership job.
Her grandfather and three of his
children, including her mother, were
forced by the U.S. government into
internment camps during the second
World War. Her own childhood was
shaped by a mix of cultures. She was
raised partly on a resettlement camp,
where she learned Spanish from interacting
with farmworkers from Mexico
and spoke it fluently alongside English
and Japanese.
School itself did not reflect this early
experience with cultural fluency. Despite
her language abilities, Kitamura
was placed in the lower-tier " yellow
house " reading group in early elementary
school, even as other pupils
were sorted into other color groups
that, she realized only much later,
directly corresponded to stereotypes
about ethnicity and skin color.
In college, Kitamura majored in
agriculture and worked a few years in
production. But drawn to the teaching
profession with the goal of undoing
for others some of the damage her
family had experienced in the school
system, she pursued a teaching credential
in agriculture from California
State University, Chico, and began a
decades-long education career.
She came to the Santa Rosa city
district in 2013 to head up curriculum
and instruction, rose to the associate
"
Why would
anyone want
to hit their head
against the wall
forever?
LAURIE FONG
School board president
Santa Rosa, Calif., district
Diann Kitamura is the
superintendent in the Santa
Rosa, Calif., school district,
which was battered by
massive wildfires and then
the pandemic. Kitamura will
step down at the end of
June.
fullness and detail to the picture. It's
been longstanding policy to have a
Spanish language interpreter at public
meetings to serve the high proportion
of native Spanish speaking parents,
for example, but Kitamura has flipped
that around. Now, some parent meetings
are conducted in Spanish, with an
English interpreter.
Herrington, the elected Sonoma
County superintendent, recalled
how he tapped Kitamura to take a
look at a coloring book for young
children the county was developing
with the school nurses' association
to explain what COVID-19 was, and
why students wouldn't be able to
go to school for a while. It was Kitamura
who recommended changing
an illustration of a sick child with
Asian features. She worried that it
might fuel anti-Asian sentiment in
the county.
" I just appreciated it so much, and
the nurses appreciated it so much, "
Herrington said. " It's that kind of perspective
that someone brings to the
table that I'm afraid we are going to
lose. "
'Uneasy lies the head that wears
the crown'
The superintendency is not a job
for the faint-hearted even on the best
of days, and it's been especially challenging
in the past few years.
It now takes just one ill-placed
Tweet to produce a pandemonium of
confusion and outrage. School funding
revisions, like California's recent
Local Control Funding Formula, have
added mountains of new paperwork
and requirements.
Labor relations nationally have
shifted dramatically: The Red for
Ed movement and the U.S. Supreme
Court's decision in the Janus case,
which prohibited unions from charging
bargaining fees of nonmembers,
has put striking back in teachers'
unions toolbox. In Santa Rosa, before
a renaissance in labor-management
relations, it had contributed to protracted
negotiations and scores of
grievances from teachers.
And finally, in a profession with
Ramin Rahimian for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - June 9, 2021

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