Leader Addresses Staff
New superintendent urges energy savings and helping kids to succeed
It was a superintendent’s quandary: Do you take teachers and staff away for about two hours from their preparations for today’s start of the ’08/’09 school year, or do you leave them to their labors?
Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez, starting her first school year as head of Santa Fe Public Schools, decided that having a “meet and greet” was important enough to make the time.
“I felt sort of guilty,” she told a group of employees from Sweeney and Ramirez-Thomas/Bilingual Early Childhood Center Tuesday, “but it’s important for me to see you” and vice versa. Gutierrez has held a dozen of the gatherings for different groupings of schools in the past week.
She introduced her “right and left hands,” deputy superintendent Mel Morgan and associate superintendent Denise Johnston, as well as Bernadette LeRouge, a former school board member who is now parent educator coordinator for special education.
Gutierrez brought the staff up to date on a number of issues, from the launch of a new Web site Thursday to the fact that the State of the Schools address will be held in the Roundhouse rotunda in November. “We’ll be releasing our very first district accountability report,” said Gutierrez, quipping that if the governor could speak there, the superintendent also should be able to.
And she had a lot to say about rising energy costs. Gutierrez asked the group “to keep our students close to home this year” and to consider “walking field trips” when possible.
“I was astounded when our transportation director stacked up all our field trips to Albuquerque,” Gutierrez said.
With a 15-cent-per-mile deficit in buying gas for the district’s 84 buses, the district will face a $325,000 deficit at the end of the year. “That’s money (that could be used) for supplies ... and pay raises,” she said. And even though the Legislature in its special session approved an adjustment that will give $84,000 to Santa Fe, it’s won’t eliminate the deficit.
The cost of heating and cooling the schools also is rising, she said. “I got really excited in early August” by the rain, she said, “thinking we could shut off the ‘air,’ but on Friday it was 95 degrees.” Gutierrez said the district hopes, however, to have six to eight weeks when the facilities could run without heating or cooling. And she urged small measures: Turn off lights when leaving the classroom, log off all computers and turn off monitors before going home. Those small steps could add up to “hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings,” she said.
“Also this year, for any 12-month employees, we will be closing this building (SFPS headquarters) and B.F. Young (building) for two weeks of winter break,” said Gutierrez.
In discussing her appreciation for teachers’ hard work, she noted that pay raises will be in the teachers’ paychecks Friday. Gutierrez also told any teachers interested in being nationally board-certified that they could attend a Thursday meeting at 4 p.m. at 610 Alta Vista to discuss the process. “It adds about $4,500 onto your annual pay,” she said.
She also shared the district’s mission, saying she realized many teachers don’t know what it is: “SFPS exists to ensure that every student graduates prepared to be a productive citizen of our local and global community.” Gutierrez said her personal vision as superintendent features three themes: the power of knowledge, liberation through literacy, and relevance through relationships.
In a planning group recently, Gutierrez said, participants were touched by an answer from high school students to the question: “What would make school better for you?”
Their answer, she said, was: “for our high school teachers to be like our kindergarten teachers.” What the students really were saying, according to Gutierrez, was: “We want to be recognized.”
Morgan gave a short presentation pointing out the gap in Hispanic student performance versus Anglo students. “Why are they underperforming?” he asked.
Gutierrez asked all teachers and principals to help change that. Morgan said Santa Fe is 49 percent Hispanic, 45 percent Anglo, and 12 percent below the federal poverty level. But of the 13,557 students in the district, 85 percent are Hispanic, 12 percent Anglo, and 74 percent are in the free/ reduced lunch program.
For questions about the Santa Fe schools, log onto www.sfps.info or call 467-2000. For questions about special education, contact Bernadette LeRouge, parent educator coordinator for special education, at 467-2516.
