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| Since December 22, 2004 |
Keeping Up Appearances: The Semblence of Stability
In business academia, the term “destructive leadership behavior” defines the bullying tactics of a leader more focused on personal gain than the needs or values of the organization. This bullying leads to complete disruption within the organization, effecting the employees and career paths of hundreds if not thousands of workers subordinate to the bully in power (
).
During Esperanza Zendejas’ tenure as the superintendent of the ESUHSD, we reported on how her managerial style led to the rapid departure of a number of administrators (). We also reported on similar behavior exhibited during her days as the superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools (). Her claim to infamy rested on her constant shuffling of administrators to different school sites with no real justification other than a desire to intimidate her subordinates.
The exorbitant instability Zendejas left her successor has been one of the most significant challenges in the East Side Union High School District since her departure. By all outward appearances, that challenge seems to have been met. The 2007-2008 school year saw only one mid-year administrative transfer, a welcome break to a disturbing three-year trend of multiple administrative changes and disruptions at many if not all of East Side’s campuses. The pendulum looks to have taken a healthy swing in the other direction.
But has stability returned to East Side, or merely the appearance of stability? The shift to the other extreme of virtually no administrative transfers creates a façade of stability that trustees, parents, and other politically connected stakeholders can buy into—a fabricated contrast that allows Superintendent Bob Nunez to distance himself from his unpopular predecessor. If Nunez makes the climate appear rosy, he comes off smelling like a rose.
While there is a definite improvement in the overall climate in East Side, the flower is withering fast at some school sites, an indication that all is not as it appears.
Having suffered numerous administrative changes during Zendejas’ reign and Nunez’ first year at the helm, Piedmont Hills began the 2007-2008 school year with what appeared to be a stable administrative team. However, the school’s APA, Frances Palacios, boasts a mediocre performance record. She has bounced between various school sites during her East Side tenure, with no demonstrable upward mobility in her career. Still, as long as the campus climate remains relatively calm, Palacios will not engender a shift in staff or community morale.
New principal Traci Williams, however, can. Piedmont’s last principal left two months after being appointed to the post, setting the stage for Williams’ arrival as a welcome prospect of stability. Privately, questions arose about whether nepotism played a factor in her appointment, a suspicion that never rose above an unconfirmed rumor. Williams did herself no favors in squelching that rumor this May when she wrote the following letter to the Mercury News in support of Craig Mann, former trustee of the ESUHSD and Dr. Zendejas’ chief supporter during her tenure:
Mann understands runaway growth
Craig Mann has stood up to the developers who have too much influence at San Jose City Hall, and now they are attacking him with negative mailers. It makes sense. Craig Mann is the one candidate who understands that the runaway growth in Evergreen is causing horrible traffic congestion, strangling our neighborhood services and causing overcrowding in our local schools. I am voting for Craig Mann for San Jose City Council because he is putting the interests of our neighborhoods and schools first over the financial interests of others.
Traci Williams
Principal Piedmont Hills High School San Jose.
Mann should not be a stranger to Unruly Advocate readers. Scandal plagued his term as an East Side trustee and as chief of staff for Terry Gregory (). Mann’s caustic rhetoric and vitriolic attacks on teachers cost him the support of East Side teacher and employee union PACs in subsequent elections (). In his recent bid for a seat on San Jose’s city council, Mann’s scandalous past earned him the nickname “Teflon Mann” (). In the end Mann’s past finally caught up with him: he took a lackluster 4th in the race for the district 8 council seat.
Given Mann’s history, the prudent approach for a person in power is to maintain a professional distance from controversial figures. Williams failed to do so, and she failed to disclose that she is Mann’s sister-in-law in her letter. Understandably, Williams faced a difficult decision in writing a simple letter of support for a family member. Supporting a candidate with one of the worst relationships with employee unions in the history of East Side, however, carries a significant cost, especially when using her professional title to give the endorsement weight. Most likely Williams will recover from this minor setback, but at the moment some on her staff cannot rid the bad taste of nepotism from their open mouths.
Meanwhile, concerns have surfaced about the quality of leadership at EVHS. EVHS principal Cari Vaeth, whose controversial past at Independence High School sullied her reputati on as a school leader among teachers in the district, appears to have alienated some members of the Evergreen community with her managerial style. Vocal parent groups routinely raise concerns to district officials and trustees about administrative leadership. However, discerning truth from fiction in the Evergreen community can be daunting. Vocal parents abound in Evergreen and tend to drown out legitimate concerns with irrelevant complaints and petty personal grievances.
Staff, however, has expressed a growing lack of confidence in the site’s APED, Angela Cornelius. While there is no one story to point to as of this writing, one can get a sense of the parental frustrations with site administration from their comments on the Great Schools website;
Over the past couple of years escalating violence at Oak Grove High School garnered unwanted attention from local paper the San Jose Mercury News. East Side officials desperately want to keep these negative stories out of the press, but growing concerns for safety within the community have alarmed staff and parents alike, and seem to indicate an administrative failure to maintain a safe learning and working environment.
In the 2006/2007 school year, a near riot erupted during lunch that resulted in a San Jose police officer losing his hat and radio to a group of students. In May of 08, rumor of a potential gang fight involving guns caused the school to declare a “code blue” lockdown.
The most tragic event occurred in May when a girl with purported gang affiliations repeatedly stabbed another girl ten times. The tragic incident sharply increased safety fears among staff. Oak Grove principal Richard Frias came under fire for trying to portray the event as “an unfortunate, but isolated incident.”
Team Unruly has learned from sources at Oak Grove wishing to remain anonymous that Frias and other site administrators told district officials the event took place after school. Teachers witnessing the event claim it took place between passing periods during the school day, on a part of campus adjacent to but not in the faculty parking lot as reported by the Mercury News. The appearance of a cover up by site administration to turn another newsworthy violent event into an “isolated incident” to avoid public and professional scrutiny has demoralized Oak Grove’s teachers. “A few years ago we were all behind Frias,” one Oak Grove teacher tells us on condition of anonymity, “now we can’t trust him.”
Without question the school that suffered the most since the days of Zendejas is Andrew Hill. By March of 2007, Andrew Hill underwent no less than 22 administrative changes in a five year period. In 2007 alone 3 principals and two APEDs transferred in and out of the school. After heated discussion with the superintendent and members of the district cabinet last March, it appeared that Hill would finally have a stable administrative team for the new school year. The new principal, Bettina Lopez, spoke encouragingly to the staff, acknowledging the difficulties of their past and promising to keep her administrative team dedicated to serving the school for five years.
But within a month problems began to surface that proved a stable administrative team does not always lead to stability. New APED Noemi Ramirez, a former student advisor at Hill, used her newfound authority to chastise a teacher about his classroom management skills in front of his students. Soon after, the teacher filed a transfer request.
Ramirez, through conversations and staff presentations, created an impression that she would have difficulty building a master schedule. Long-standing programs at the site were suddenly under scrutiny in an apparent move to eliminate single classes to simplify the master schedule development process for her. Teachers involved with the UCO program were initially told that the program was no longer in existence at other sites as a justification for its elimination. A meeting between those teachers and site administration took place during the last week of school in 2007, and a tentative agreement to keep the program was reached.
In the summer, the principal and APED cut the program anyway. Cuts to other specialized courses similarly occurred.
When school started that fall, Ramirez showed signs of being overwhelmed. She began micromanaging counselors by decree, leading to a number of hostile and confrontational incidents that would escalate throughout the school year.
Three weeks into the school year, a couple of teaching positions remained unfilled. After hiring a new English teacher, Lopez and Ramirez decided to change another new teacher’s schedule within that department to accommodate the new hire, an uncomfortable but not=2 0uncommon occurrence at the start of a school year. However, neither Lopez nor Ramirez bothered to tell the teacher in question about the change. A sub appeared the morning her schedule changed to cover her classes so she could prepare for the transition, and it was the substitute who told the teacher her schedule had been altered.
Initially the majority of teachers gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. After all, the entire administrative team was new to their jobs, and none of them had familiarity with the school’s history, culture, and programs. But as the first semester went on, conflicts between staff and administration continued to build. Staff morale started to decline. By the second semester, morale was eradicated.
In February under pressure from district officials, Lopez was ordered to get the staff to change Hill’s block schedule. Discussion began with an open attempt to examine the pros and cons of the current schedule, but by the second or third meeting, Lopez informed the schedule sub-committee that the current schedule was illegal and must be changed. Over the next few weeks her story itself would change and with a variety of conflicting justifications given to staff. As the contractual deadline for school-wide change drew nearer, divisive staff meetings and email exchanges left frustrated teachers seeking answers. A proposed compromis e modified block schedule, developed in haste to meet the contractual deadline, failed to earn staff support.
While multiple factors led to the fall of the compromise schedule, it cannot be denied that the previous semester’s numerous conflicts between management and staff made teachers suspicious of Lopez’ motives. Administrative error was largely at fault.
But the district wound up blaming the staff for its inability to make the change. In direct violation of the ESTA collective bargaining agreement, Associate Superintendent Dan Moser delivered a memo with an opening line that directly blamed the staff. Team Unruly has learned that Moser intended to only send a letter to the staff informing them of the change, but was forced to attend a special staff meeting to make the announcement a week before the end of the school year.
Moser’s information contradicted what Lopez told the staff. In the end, the divisive battle over the compromise versus the block schedule turned out to be completely futile. According to Moser, Program Improvement required the school to revert back to a traditional schedule. The proposed compromise was deemed illegal by PI mandates.
The damage to morale, however, had alre ady been done. Historically Andrew Hill possesses a reputation for having, on average, the fewest number of teacher transfer requests. In the school’s fifty-year history, Andrew Hill became a destination school, with more teachers requesting to transfer in than out. Prior to Zendejas, only one teacher requested a transfer out of the school in ten years. By the spring of 2008, at least 10 staff members submitted transfer requests. “[Lopez and Ramirez] are dismantling the school,” one of those teachers informs the Advocate on condition of anonymity. “I can’t stand to watch this school fall apart.”
That, unfortunately, is not all. At a sparsely attended school site council meeting in May, council members discussed various cuts to personnel funded by Title 1. Lopez presented a convoluted plan that resulted in the loss of two school counselors, but somehow led to the creation of a part-time small learning community coordinator. The elimination of the counselors took place well after the legal pink slip cutoff of March 15th, a clear violation of the law. To make matters worse, the two counselors targeted for elimination did not find out until the last week of school that their positions would not be funded in the following school year.
In late June, an enraged parent group held a meeting with the principal, the superintendent , one of the counselors, and some noteworthy political representatives, including a staffer from Joe Coto’s office to get to the bottom of this controversy. While no concrete answers were given beyond reconvening school site council to reinstate the positions, attendees discovered that Andrew Hill was the only school in the district to cut counseling positions. Even worse, mounting evidence has given rise to the suspicion that the principal seized an opportunity to get rid of the head counselor whom she set up as a straw man to take the blame for the innumerable conflicts between counselors and Ramirez. The head counselor, however, routinely received high praise from staff for her professionalism and competence. Rather than accepting responsibility for Ramirez’ past mistakes, the principal appears to be stubbornly defending her APED at all costs.
Moments before publishing this edition of the Advocate, Team Unruly learned that Lopez mentioned to a Hill staff member she was considering hiring a cousin to fill the now-open counseling position.
What price is Superintendent Nunez willing to pay to keep up the appearance of stability? Will destructive leaders be allowed to remain in their positions? While fostering stability remains an admirable goal, administrative incompetence cannot be ignored to preserve appearances. Difficult decisions regarding administrative transfers must b e made soon; otherwise the destructive leadership behavior of a few site administrators will cause irreparable damage.
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