SANTA CRUZ >> Last year’s announcement that four-term Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Michael Watkins would not seek re-election left a vacancy his deputy director, Faris Sabbah, is hoping to fill.
Running unopposed for the top job in local K-12 education in the June primary election, Sabbah is poised to do exactly that.
As a child, Sabbah immigrated from Iraq to the U.S. with his family at age 9 to escape the Iran-Iraq War. Two years later he moved to his mother’s birthplace of Ecuador, where he attended middle and high school before returning to the U.S. to study at UC Santa Cruz.
Sabbah began his career as a teacher at Aptos High School before stepping into the role of director of migrant education at Pajaro Valley Unified School District, a position he held for 14 years. After a two-year stint as assistant superintendent in Monterey County, Sabbah returned to Santa Cruz County to work under Watkins as the deputy superintendent of schools in 2016.
Sabbah, 46, attended graduate school at San Jose State before receiving a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. He is married to Blanca Baltazar-Sabbah, an administrator in the Salinas Union High School District, with whom he has two young children.
Helmed by the county superintendent, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education serves as a bridge between the 10 local school districts and the state. It provides a backbone of oversight and support services to teachers and schools and also functions as its own school district with speciality education programs, charter schools and programs for populations of youth with specific needs.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
A: Assuming you are elected superintendent in June, what do you hope to accomplish?
Q: The main reason I came here was because of (Superintendent) Michael Watkins. His students-first, student-focused approach is so refreshing in education, and something I want to continue to build on. So when I look at him and his leadership and legacy and when I think about what I want to be able to contribute to that legacy, I want to be able to build on many things he’s done and expand many things that he has done.
I’ll give you an example. Michael Watkins, as a director of alternative education and of course later as the county superintendent, built these personalized alternative education schools all over the county. So we have, I think, 32 different schools; a lot of them are just single classroom schools. Our idea is to customize learning for students. If you have a group of students who have issues related to drugs, and they need mental health resources to clean up, stay sober and be successful in school we have a program specifically for that. We built a brand new school in Watsonville, Sequoia High School, and for each of those students they have a personalized learning plan — some of it is independent study work, some of it is them coming in daily to meet with a teacher, and some if it is technology based, but this idea of individualized learning — when you look at all the alternative education programs across the state, their numbers are dropping, but our numbers are not, ours are staying pretty continuous and pretty stable. We have about 800 students, and that has been pretty consistent over the last few years, whereas most other counties in the state are basically shutting down programs because all the districts are keeping their students and not sending them to the county office anymore.
We’re looking at doing the same thing for adult learning. So we’ve started a charter school for adult learning, and our idea is to do the same thing, to create these customized learning environments for students who really were not successful and who have aged out of the school program. So we’re going to try to that same kind of model — build on that legacy and build on that model so we can expand it and serve a wider range of people.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges ahead for education in Santa Cruz County?
A: I think that equity is front and center — has been for many years, and I think that we still struggle. If you look at any measure of success, you’ll notice there is an achievement gap, and that there are students from low-income families who are Latino, who are African American, who are language learners, are underperforming in almost any measure of success: graduation rates, classification rates, grades, entrance into university, you can pick almost any area. There have been some areas of improvement, and we do see some fluctuations in the patterns of the data with math and language arts, but generally speaking we have not really addressed the achievement gap in our county or in the state.
I think that our approach may continue to be over simplistic. We keep looking for single solutions, single points of contact for students. It’s a combination of lack of resources but also a very complex number of different variables that make it difficult to isolate the thing that’s going to have a causal improvement on the things that we’re looking for. And we’re trying, we’re trying very hard. I don’t think any school district in our county is saying ‘Oh, we’ve got this figured out,’ but the more wholistic, the more comprehensive, the more family we bring — the more we can be comprehensive, I think, the more likely it is we are going to be to really figure out what it is that our students need to be successful. So that’s one piece.
Funding is going to be a challenge, especially with the pressures of the compensation needs for our employees. You see what’s happening in PVUSD with the struggle — they’re looking at how much funding there is, what the reserves are, and then looking at compensation and comparing to other people in other areas and saying, you know, there’s a big discrepancy, we need to use that funding to compensate teachers more appropriately and be able to track and keep teachers here. That’s going to be a challenge. As the revenue is flat and the costs are going up, there is going to be a lot of tension and a lot of conflict there as a result.
Q: What role can the county office of education play in mitigating those challenges?
A: Since we oversee the budgets for the district and since we have some oversight, one of the things we do is, the districts provide their budgets for three years and we review them and tell them if their budgets look good or not, and we report that information to the board. If their budgets do not look good, then we would tell them that and tell them they have to resubmit. In very rare cases, the county office would actually take over a school district and take the authority away from the board for spending. That doesn’t happen too often, but if the school district looks like they can’t keep their costs under control, then that would be something the district would have to do. So on the one side we’re here making sure the district has a three year window of stability when it comes to their budget. At the same time, we want to support the school districts as they look at compensation for their employees and minimize, let’s say, antagonism in the negotiation process. In same cases — it’s rare — but both parties will ask the county superintendent to get involved in helping with the negotiation process when they don’t want to get to point where things are going to lead, let’s say, toward a strike. One of the main roles of the county superintendent is to encourage folks to get to a settlement, to get an agreement.
Q: How are you looking what appears to be a growing wave of activism among high school students, with the National Walkout in March being the most obvious example?
A: I’m really excited. I was a history teacher, and students fighting for their rights is a beautiful thing. I think as educators we have to be somewhat careful, even if we personally support the cause, we have to really thoughtful in how we respond. But we do have an opportunity to create the space for students to be able to develop their leadership skills. One of the things we’re looking at is forums for students to be able to — let’s take gun control, or gun violence reduction effort. I do think it’s great that students were able to make their statement, but I do believe it is part of our responsibility to give them consequences if they walked out of school. This is the controversial thing. Yes you have a First Amendment right to speak but you can’t walk out of school, because if you did that for something else — we’re setting a precedent for that. But I do think in my experience having a long-term plan is part of any good approach for positive change, so what I would like to do in the future, maybe starting next year, is work on ways to help students define what is important to them, what policy or practice or situation they want to change, then to help them develop plans where they can actively get engaged in that change and be part of a long-term solution.
We did a few small projects when I was with the migrant program where we helped students develop some of their policies and opportunities. We had mixed results, but one of our projects was for them to manage their own middle school leadership conference. We were in the room, and we watched them. They had one of the biggest middle school conferences year after year with over 500 students, and it was planned and carried out by students.
Q: If elected, when you look back at your first term as superintendent four years from now, how are you going to evaluate your own success?
A: I think that a necessary part of our process has to be kind of a strategic plan and some defined objectives. I think there have to be internal objectives that would have to be developed as well as some student-centered ones. An internal objective could be, let’s say increasing efficiency in something as simple as response time to emails. I do think that quantifying ways of community involvement, engaging our community — those are kind of challenging ways, but I think that looking at how much awareness people in the community have in what we do is something that I’m interested in increasing. And then of course having forums that would allow people to really partake in designing this vision. So, I think it’s important for me to not really jump to think I have the solutions to everything, and to really listen. Now that I’m running uncontested, that’s what I’m doing. I’m setting up student forums — and I’ll be working with adults as well — but just listening to students and what they’d like to see differently about their education.