After 30 years in education, including the past nearly two years as superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, I have decided to retire this summer.
It has been my privilege to serve with the Board of Education of SAUSD for the past two years. I want to thank you for the tremendous support you have given our school district teachers, administrators and Board Members.
I am tremendously proud of the team work that has created better schools for Santa Ana’s children. It has been an honor for me to serve as superintendent of this great school district, and I will cherish for the rest of my life the wonderful memories of the time I spent working side by side with our teachers and staff—and with you, the parents of the Santa Ana community—to improve the lives of the students we have the privilege to serve.
While these past two years have been an enormously rewarding experience for me as an educator, the requirements of the work have demanded that I live in Orange County five days a week, away from my husband and family who all live in the Los Angeles area. I have made this decision to retire so that I can live with my husband and see my family again on a daily basis. While leaving the school district is a very difficult decision for me professionally, and it will be very difficult to say goodbye to you and your wonderful children, I know that, personally, this is the right decision for my family and me at this time.
The community should be proud of the great progress SAUSD has made—with the concerted efforts of you and other Santa Ana parents. Working as a team, you and other parents, teachers, administrators and staff, and especially our Board Members have achieved a great deal in these past two years:
Strategic Planning
· We created a SAUSD Strategic Plan. By identifying key district level goals, SAUSD professionals can focus all their energies on an organized set of initiatives.
· The district established “The 9 Steps to Success,” what the district calls the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). With this, we can measure success at the district level and for individual schools.
Parental Engagement
· Most importantly, at the district we have attempted to engage you and other Santa Ana parents, so you can participate more directly in the education of your children. The district now provides a two-year parent training program. You and other SAUSD parents can now learn what you can do to optimize your children’s education. To this end, the district now partners with the Orange County Business Council, and have employed their Latino Educational Attainment Initiative to provide this essential service to you.
· The district also has a greater role to play. We established a new position of Constituent Services Director. As a result of a number of community-wide forums that you might remember we undertook two years ago, the district personnel have worked on specific proposals to build greater parent and community engagement. One of several district responses to your suggestions as parents was to set up a SAUSD team to work directly on parent and community engagement.
· We also launched the SAUSD Customer Service Campaign. In order to create and reinforce the vital link between you and your child’s school, the district developed an employee-training program and mounted a campaign to make serving every Santa Ana parent and his or her child the top priority of all district personnel.
Academics
· We have increased the academic rigor in SAUSD schools. The district helped 840 teachers (kindergarten through 5th grade) implement new, more scholastically challenging Common Core Units of Study in the language arts and math.
· We established a new career pathway for SAUSD schools. The district set up an academy in two K–8 schools. This will eventually feed into a high school academy that is planned. A third K–8 school will soon join them.
· We developed a school and student “Data Dashboard.” The dashboard organizes the full range of individual school information and performance data from a number of disparate sources, so SAUSD educational professionals have at their fingertips all the pertinent information to make sure your child and every SAUSD child is progressing appropriately.
Professional Development
- We established the Assistant Principal to Principal Preparation Program (APT 3P). We designed this program to develop the skill sets of our assistant principals so they can become effective principals who can create better learning environments for your children.
State Policymaking
· SAUSD now has a seat at the table in statewide policy making. By engaging with Sacramento legislators, SAUSD—and by extension you as parents—now have a greater voice. For example, the district is a member of Governor Jerry Brown’s Kitchen Cabinet. SAUSD now stands out from over 1,000 California districts in lawmakers’ minds when they consider policies that impact your children.
I wish to thank you, the parents and community members of Santa Ana, for all the tremendous support I have received as we have worked together to improve the education of Santa Ana’s children. The progress we have made could not have been possible without your strong support.
Public education has never been just a job for me—it is my passion, my life’s calling. I will continue to work to help children in every way I can. The only change is that I want to be close to my home in Los Angeles so that I may also spend as much time as possible with my family. We all need our family.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be part of the education of your children.
Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, Ph.D.
Superintendent
