Farewell from Superintendent Dr. Stan Rose
At tonight's Board of Trustees meeting, retiring Superintendent Dr. Stan Rose shared the following open letter to staff, families, and community:
With a heart full of gratitude and an inward tear of sadness, I am taking my final leave of all of you and of education as a full time career. My gratitude begins here in Santa Clara where I have had the privilege of working with a wealth of cultural diversity, brilliant intellects, pockets of economic wealth beyond anything I have ever known, and daily kindness of spirit that few experience in the workplace. The City and the District (Remember, we occupy parts of San Jose, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Campbell) are filled with people who support our schools. In the time that I have served as Superintendent, we have passed over one billion dollars in general obligation bonds and have experienced a parcel tax that helped get us through the remnants of the Great Recession. Even our developers have provided additional financial support for construction by offering more than their legally required fees to support our schools. You all know better than I the amount of volunteer hours our parents and community spend each year to support our children.
The result of all this support, coupled with the unsurpassed commitment of our teachers, classified staff, and our administrators, is that our students are doing better academically. Our rates of literacy and our competency in math and science have been improving steadily. Our graduation rates have risen dramatically. We now recognize and minister to the needs of our students more completely through attention to the social and emotional parts of their lives. There are so many more things that could be mentioned here, but time and space limit.
One particular item I want to mention is the ever-increasing systems of communication that we have created over the past four plus years. Making space for people from all corners of our district to engage in conversations around teaching and learning is a vital component of any healthy learning community. We have created safe places for such conversations to occur. In this environment, we sometimes hear things that hurt or make us angry, but getting through those feelings usually takes us all to a better place for our students.
There is much in the works here in Santa Clara, as I say goodbye. We are building three new schools in North San Jose, rebuilding a school or schools in the Southwest corner of our district, building a new campus on the Monticello property, opening new buildings on our Cabrillo and Central Park campuses, and making a list of improvements across other campuses of our district. We are about to open a dual immersion school at one of our campuses. For all this and all of the above, I thank the Board of Education, and I thank all of you. As I stated, I have lived a privileged life here in Santa Clara to be a small part of all that has and will occur.
For those of you who want to put down this letter, now that I have finished talking about Santa Clara, here is your spoiler alert. What follows is an expression of thoughts around the prior 40 years in education, before these past six years.
I began my career in 1973, when I took a job teaching Social Studies and Language Arts to 7th and 8th graders in a small logging town outside of Portland Oregon. It was a one-year stint where I was filling in for someone who was on leave, though I did not know it at the time. I found that job through Lewis and Clark College in Portland, where I had completed my 5th year credential program, after receiving my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Portland. That brief time in Oregon was the only time I left my beloved State of California. I spent the rest of my career working in private and then public schools. As with all of you, all of my experiences taught me something about learning and living. Working in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, the Diocese of San Jose, the network of Sacred Heart Schools, and Nueva Day School and Learning Center taught me the importance of ministering to the whole child. I learned that the moral/ethical, and social needs of students were central to a full learning experience. Working with students in economically advantaged circumstances taught me that being relatively wealthy, though it had the potential for creating access to a complete learning experience, did not translate into a complete education. In fact, some of my wealthiest students demonstrated such a low level of emotional intelligence that I was left wondering what was missing in their lives. In many cases, I concluded that such students were missing caring adults on a daily basis. Some felt kept, but not cared for.
Then, I had the privilege of going to work in highest poverty portion of San Jose, East San Jose. I saw firsthand what lack of access to learning options, health care, housing, nutrition, and language support can do to limit education and prevent escaping the cycle of poverty. The learning opportunity for me was the growing realization that, amid such poverty, there was an amazingly high level of emotional intelligence. People who had nothing but each other taught me the value of interdependence and how such interdependence contributed to emotional intelligence. There was a resilience in this community that supported students’ success in life after school. Most importantly for me, I was able to engage in safe conversations about racism with people of color who were more than willing to share their experiences in order to build a better world for their children. Such conversations were heartbreaking and a true gift. Those experiences have informed the last twenty-four years of my work in education.
Most of the above could not have prepared me for life as a Superintendent. All of it was necessary for administering to school districts, but little of it informed success in governance of school districts. Honestly, it is the politics of governance for which superintendents are ill prepared. I have been blessed with boards that genuinely want to do good, and do well for their communities. I have seen boards—and I will not comment on where—that are more concerned with their individual selves than they are with the districts to which they minister.
I have a belief system that teaches that there are no coincidences. Everything is for a purpose. All of the experiences I have had as a person and those that I have had professionally have led me to the place I now occupy—for only a few more days.
I am leaving knowing that it is time to go home. It is time for new leadership to lead Santa Clara to a whole new and better place. Part of my journey led me to the words of Bishop Oscar Romero, recently Canonized, who said:
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view…
No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.
So, I end this the in way I started, full of gratitude for the great gift I have been given, to work in education for these past 46 years. Whether public education or private, whether working in wealth or in poverty, I have received far more than I have given. I leave knowing that the work is unfinished. But it is time for me to move over and let someone younger, hopefully better, than I am to enter and take the next steps in the journey. Thank you all for the gift of allowing me to be part of you.
Sincerely,
Stanley Rose III, Ed.D.
Superintendent
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