In this episode of the Engaging Leadership show, host CT Leong converses with Yolanda Valdez, the superintendent of the Cutler Orosi Joint Unified School District. Valdez, who grew up in the district she now oversees, shares her unique leadership journey, insights into community engagement, and the impactful changes she has spearheaded over the past decade.

Central to the discussion is Valdez's philosophy of focusing on what can be controlled, implementing a community schools approach to support the whole child, and nurturing an educational ecosystem that promotes success for all students. Valdez elaborates on the significance of aligning district resources and personnel around a unified vision and mission, emphasizing the importance of having relentless, courageous, and resilient leaders in education. This episode is a treasure trove of insights into leadership, transformation, and community building in the education sector.

Key Takeaways:

• Community-Centered Leadership: Yolanda Valdez underscores the importance of building educational systems that serve not just students but their families and the broader community.
• Vision and Mission Alignment: Effective leadership demands a clear and continually communicated vision. At Cutler Orosi, every activity and program is aligned to target the collective educational goals.
• Support Systems: The district’s community school model offers a tiered system of supports that provides holistic assistance to students and families, ensuring they can thrive academically and personally.
• Professional Growth and Collaboration: Valdez highlights the importance of professional learning communities, coaching, and actionable feedback, ensuring that educators are supported and continuously improving.
• Resilience in Leadership: For aspiring leaders, Valdez stresses the need to be relentless, courageous, instructional leaders who are also resilient, focusing on their sphere of influence despite external challenges.

Chapters:

0:00

Transforming Lives and Communities Through Committed Educational Leadership

8:10

Comprehensive Community School Model Supporting Students and Families.

19:25

Creating Clarity and Alignment in Educational Leadership

27:41

Yolanda Valdez's Journey from Teacher to Superintendent

35:06

Relentless, Courageous, and Resilient Leadership in Education

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Yolanda: linkedin.com/in/yolanda-valdez-b35a9342

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda

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Engage Rocket is a leadership listening and insights tool to help school district leaders improve teacher retention, engagement, and ultimately student achievement outcomes. Today, in the studio, it's a great privilege for me to have our guest, Yolanda Valdez. She's the superintendent of Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified School District, and she's going to share a little bit more about her leadership journey and her district.

So welcome to the show, Yolanda.

And so that allows us to really look at our positions or look at how we serve in a very purposeful manner.

So this is a tall order for us, right? Because there's achievement gaps that right in first day of school, our students don't have the amount of language that others don't have the resources that others do. But we don't focus on that. We only focus on what we can control.

We focus on how we can make a difference. And that's what makes our district super special.

You've been serving the community for coming to 11 years now. And you must have seen a massive change and you must have had the ability to drive massive change in the lives of so many students.

Would you be able to speak to some of the changes that you're most proud of and accomplishments within the district and the students that you're really proud of?

I'm going to say that Yolanda Valdez had insight to surround herself with very competent and passionate and hardworking individuals. And this team has created an educational ecosystem that really nurtures the success of our students. We are among the highest A through G completers.

We are among the highest CSU UC acceptance for a community like ours. This is a great feat. In fact, in Tulare County, in many areas, we are over our city counterparts. We are an unincorporated community here in Cutler-Orosi of 18, 000 people. And when you're unincorporated, you don't have a city structure.

And this is a ministry because if we come to serve every single day, believing that this is a ministry and that we have to serve with great heart, then we can tackle all the challenges that come our way. Then we can look at the everyday work with an asset mindset and not a deficient mindset.

And this community is becoming healthier because of that. At one point, this community's gang involvement was off the charts. Every time you picked up the paper, you would read about this. And I'm so happy to say that has improved by a hundred percent. Because ưe as a school system committed to keep our children's busy in great things like athletics and building our academies and pathways and going out and building an extended after school program.

I just took the promotions as they were coming. And I've had many opportunities to lead this little community. I have committed to the community because we still have work to do. And I think that longevity and commitment has really brought about the improvements that people notice in the community.

And definitely our educational system is seen.

And it sounds like it merges quite neatly with the kind of impact that you're talking about. Would you share a little bit more about what that is and how you're thinking about it?

Perhaps they're dealing with abuse in the home. Perhaps they're dealing with alcoholism or drug addiction. And so through our family education center, they ascend through our system of supports. They are provided that those additional resources and our social workers, our outreach aid case manage these families at that level.

This allows the families to see our schools as the hub of their student's education and support. Again, we have a system where when the school has exhausted all of their resources and they go on to our family education center for further support.

How did you get this model set up? Because I can imagine just thinking about the kind of engagement that you must have had with the school board, the kind of campaigning, you need to have a lot of stakeholders that you need to convince to invest this kind of resources to be able to make it happen.

But really the services that we provide are about supporting parents with all the barriers that they have to parent and to go out and provide for their children. We provide before school services. So we provide extended learning and enrichment services with our students.

Our students get to go on incredible learning field trips throughout the year. Filling in that gap of resources because what we want for our students here is what every middle class child has. And so we fill in the gap through our school services, or we fill in the gap through funding, through grants, and we've been quite successful in doing that.

We've always had that. That has been one of our core values. It wasn't a hard sell or I can't even say that it wasn't even a sell for our board because our board is completely focused on our students, our families in our community and supporting staff that do that work.

That is what they will voice. That is what they will support. They've never had any barriers in respects to serving our students, supporting families and supporting our staff. So I think that all begins with a real clear vision of why we exist.

There's a lot of gaps. And I think that our board, or I know that our board sees that we're relentless as a team to go out and obtain resources to fill those gaps. And that is exactly what our team has done. So when you say, Yolanda, what you have done, I take that a little because it really hasn't been all about, what Yolanda has done.

It's about the team has done because if I didn't have a district level administrative team and site team that worked so passionately and was so resourceful minded, we wouldn't have the services that we have for this community. But I will give myself credit as a leader is that I'm a driver for that to happen as well.

What's your secret sauce? How have you been doing it?

Ensuring that all those arrows come together and are traveling towards the bullseye, which is our vision, mission, and core values. And that was quite the feat. It didn't happen overnight. It was a lot of hard work. For example, we had incredibly hardworking leaders at each of the schools.

So we brought that arrow along with working together with the principals wouldn't even give classrooms to the afterschool program. They really saw that as an outside program when really it was the district afterschool program. So all those arrows needed to come in line. The principals and all the staff at each of the schools need to see the afterschool program as partners. The people that could help them reach that ultimate reading goal, that ultimate math goal. So then we started training all our after school programs on our strategies that we use for reading, on our strategies that we use for math. And then we put those math goals and those reading goals right in front of them.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about. The systems that need to be in place. Now it just happens because we all believe that every single program that we have here at the school is to compliment our overall goals. I would say that the exact same thing was happening with our family education center.

Our family education was an outside entity and it was providing incredible services to the community, but there wasn't a system of support, a layered support so that schools access family education center. When you want to support families, you want to support them at the lowest level possible, which is a school.

I think the biggest mistake that organizations make is not examining their systems. Those are just two examples. I could keep going on. What I encountered when you ensure that all your arrows are aligned and traveling towards a bullseye, you get the best results. And who are the winners?

Our students. Additionally, isn't it amazing that our number one job as leaders, as superintendents, is that we have to provide clarity to our organization that provides clarity.

And how do you what are the ways that you use to to get a sense of is that team aligned? Is that school building aligned? How do you go about doing this?

And then if I go to our what. I'm only going to give you one because then that gets a little more messier. Let's just look at our academic instruction. How is it that we monitor our academic? How is it that we drive our academic instruction. It's the professional learning communities.

It really is much more involved and we would need more time than what we have now, but I think, as a framework, everything we do starts with the why, the how and the what and we apply it to everything. We apply it to our safety. We apply it to our leadership in the way I train our leaders.

And how does it start? For example, I just hired an assistant superintendent. First book he has to read to start with the why because he needs to understand our language. Every single presentation in our entire district starts with our mission and vision.

The vision, yeah, that's a great statement, but what are the knowledge and skills that all students should have. I just shared them with you our why. They should be college and career ready scholars. It should be powerful communicators.

They should be critical thinkers and collaborative problem solvers. They should be creative and quality producers, leaders, and ethical decision makers and productive citizens. So our parents need to hear that over and over that's what we're working on. We've weaved that why into our senior exit interview.

As superintendents, it's an accordion. If you envision that accordion coming in, coming out, coming in, coming out, and when we share our model of excellence, which is what I was just describing, that's what we call it.

No, you need to constantly be doing the work, which is that accordion.

what we call it that describes our why or how and our what and then there's a secondary support page it fleshes it out. And then there's a third one where we can now add the great instruction. We call it the GIFT.

What was it that made you agree to it? Because it's not an easy task to take on that superintendency.

I was just doing the work and having fun with it. I think that whole thing that we tell kids is find something that you enjoy and have fun with and figure out a way to get paid for it. I would say that would be my job. was having such a great time in every single one of my positions.

This is your fourth year. A person like you gets bored. And then he says, don't you want to be superintendent someday? And I'm like, I don't want your job. Anyway, to make a long story short, we agreed that he would open up the job. And if I was the best candidate then I would go, because I knew high school staff and they had to have a say who their leader was, because if he just appointed me, then that would have been a bad thing.

And it was painful. I'm not going to lie. The first couple of years was painful. Then the school was humming and then again, people see what you do and they come out and then give you another opportunity. In this case, superintendent was going to retire here from Cutler-Orosi says, Hey, I have an assistant position and you know what?

It's time for you to come home. And I came home and I haven't left yet cause it's home. There's always people that nurture you. I currently have a coach that I admire and respect very much. Juan Garza. He was a superintendent in neighboring district for 16 years.

I've had some incredible people that have really guided me and encouraged me more than anything else. I'm a pretty resourceful person. I truly believe that the passion and curiosity far exceeds IQ per se. Because I learn. Every day I have a system of, when I'm on my elliptical or when I'm walking every morning, I'm learning.

I don't listen to music. That's my opportunity for my professional development. When I have an issue or a dilemma that I have to deal with, I find the right video or podcast to listen to that then something will trigger in my mind. Yeah, that's it.

They have a lot of energy. And that was really important for me to understand. So we can craft as a staff our next steps on how we were going to nurture them, support them and so forth. That was the right thing to do along with building a real tight collaborative team with my teachers. Developing relationships and connections with our teachers and while establishing high standards. Because when I first came to that school according to the superintendent, just needed to perform. It was having behavioral issues among the students and low performing.

So as a leader I had to have a strong leadership team and then go out to a strong teacher leadership team and then a strong staff in order to serve students. And so that's what we did. We were at a really very comfortable place in four years. Those were great years and, I hold them in my heart. It wasn't a hard assignment.

We were all humming and we loved each other and we respected each other and the students were great. And then I went to the high school and it was a different story, but hey, when I left there, that's the way it was. It's been a great ride.

That has always been my mantra, but now I'm going to add resilience now. I'm going to add resilient because, education has changed in the 35 years that I've been in education. Our hands have been tied in many ways, and we can sit here and cry about what all these factors that have come, all these barriers that our legislators have given us, or, situations in our communities have given us, but I would challenge every leader to be resilient and not focus on the challenges, but focus on your sphere of influence, your sphere of power and influence.

And you can do incredible, amazing things if you just focus on that and not on the things you cannot control.

I think I've learned a lot in this conversation. And I'm sure many of our listeners have as well for those of you listening, thanks for tuning in. For the show notes and all the amazing resources that Yolanda is talking about today, head over to k12. engagerocket. net and access that treasure trove of knowledge and experience there.

There's also an archive of many other episodes that we've had on the show. So head on over and access that for free today. Thank you once again for listening. My name is CT and I've been your host for today. It's been a real pleasure. Signing off.