Gabriel Trujillo, the interim superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, started his teaching career as an avid public-school basher, he told the audience at a public forum where he was interviewing for the job of permanent superintendent Wednesday.
Now, after 11 years working in the public-school system, he’s a booster.
As a brand new teacher at a charter school in Phoenix back in 1999, he saw how district schools were failing a certain kind of student.
Those students — often minimally proficient in English, or special-needs students with learning or behavior disabilities and chronically truant students from the surrounding schools — were being pushed out of traditional public schools and landing in his charter classroom.
He heard time and again from students who said the district schools claimed to be full, or that they felt secluded there because they were repeatedly being put on in-school suspension.
“So over the course of seven years, I started developing a really not good attitude or perception of the traditional public schools,” Trujillo said. “I started thinking, ‘Hey, we’re doing it right. We’re taking everybody and educating these kids. What is going on (at public school)?’”
But when a mentor told him to either help fix the problem in district schools or “shut up” about it, Trujillo applied for a job at a traditional school and has never gone back.
Now Trujillo is trying to make TUSD into the kind of school district where those hard-to-teach students from his charter school would succeed.
“I have a vision for the Tucson Unified School District that when I close my eyes, it’s always there — this amazing K-12 experience that offers high-quality instruction in every single classroom, and a highly qualified teacher in every single classroom, with a music and performing arts teacher in every single school and a counselor and social worker in every single school, and during-the-day opportunities for kids to get support for both behavior and academic struggles,” he said.
Trujillo, who has been serving as interim superintendent since March after the TUSD Governing Board forced out previous Superintendent H.T. Sanchez, boasts that unlike the other three candidates for the job, he has already hit the ground running.
While the others have said they plan to hold “listening tours” to get up to speed, Trujillo has already visited each of TUSD’s schools and knows what principals, teachers and employees want from the district’s leadership.
“And what you’ve told me is that we have a little bit of a top-down management structure,” he said. “As employees, you don’t necessarily see us as visible at the district office, and you don’t necessarily view the district office leadership as a resource for your success.”
To that end, on his first day as permanent superintendent, Trujillo said he would launch a campaign to get central leadership into schools and connecting with employees.
One of Trujillo’s best selling points as a candidate is that he already knows the job and was an assistant superintendent since September.
But on Wednesday, he also leaned on his previous experience as a principal in the Phoenix Union High School District, and his work to get that district out from under a desegregation order.
“We had the pressure of being in the final two years of the 26-year-old Castro v. Phoenix Union High School District desegregation order. The last two or three years of any desegregation order tend to be the hardest, and at that time, it was the hardest,” he told the audience Wednesday. “And to add to the pressure of keeping the school district moving toward the unitary status that it would eventually achieve in 2008 were three large comprehensive campuses in the western Maryvale sector of Phoenix that were suspending kids from campus like gangbusters.”
However, the Phoenix Union High School District had all but settled its desegregation case by the time Trujillo started working there in 2006.
The school district and plaintiffs reached a much-lauded agreement in 2005 to achieve unitary status, though the court still retained oversight until the completion of construction of Betty H. Fairfax High School, which was finished in late 2007.
Trujillo later clarified that while the parties had already come to an agreement before he started working there, the school district was still technically under supervision of the court, and if discipline problems persisted, they could have back-slid out of the tentative unitary status.
When asked his view on a new state law that allows uncertified teachers to teach in K-12 classrooms, as long as they have at least five years of professional experience in the field they plan to teach, Trujillo’s response got a hearty round of applause from the fewer than 100 people in the audience, mostly TUSD teachers, administrators, employees and parents.
Unlike the previous two candidates to host public forums this week, Trujillo opposed the law, and argued that teaching is a skill that needs to be learned and honed.
“I’m a proud product of public education. I’m also a proud product of teacher education,” he said, adding that the barriers for new teachers to enter the workforce should be less onerous.
“It’s not that an adult with a four-year degree who doesn’t have teacher certification would be bad for kids. It’s a different skill set. It’s a profession. It’s an art,” he said.
