Goodbye Mrs. Valentino—You’ll be Missed (Part II)

In the first part of Patch’s Q&A Tuesday, Mount Washington Elementary School Principal Elizabeth Valentino outlined the strengths and exceptional qualities of one of the leading campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In this concluding installment of the wide-ranging interview, Valentino explains why she’s leaving Mount Washington for San Francisco and what she thinks are going to be the school’s biggest challenges in the years ahead. Excerpts:

Patch: Why did you decide to leave Mount Washington—and Southern California?

Elizabeth Valentino: My husband accepted a job [in San Francisco] last year. LAUSD was going through a lot of changes and there was a lot of uncertainty. He was director of instructional services at LAUSD and he needed to reapply for his job, just as all the other directors did. He has always had a goal of becoming a superintendent of a school district. And so he was applying simultaneously to other school districts and he got a position in June last year in San Francisco Unified as the associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction. It was really a step up for him—a step in the right direction. And that came at the same time that he was offered the same position he held here in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, I was still new to the school and loving the school. I started here in December 2010 and didn’t feel that it was time to go. For personal reasons I wanted to stay because I wanted to reach tenure, which in Los Angeles Unified is three years. So I thought that if I were going to move, it would be nice to go on until December 2013 at least.

But we have a young son. I didn’t initially realize how much dad was gone. So for a year I’ve been here raising our son, who now is very well aware that dad is not around. We see each other about every three to four weeks—the longest time for us has been six weeks apart.

My husband was initially offered a one-year contract and I know that school boards can sometimes be finicky about the people they bring on. For us to move our whole life would have been pretty risky initially. So there were lots of reasons for him to take the job and for me to stay. But then my husband was offered a two-year contract and I couldn’t foresee us being apart that much longer.

Patch: What are your future plans?

Valentino: I’m not sure. I’m kind of enjoying the freedom of not knowing where I’m going. I’m usually a pretty structured person—I thought I would be more anxious. But I’m actually enjoying closing this position and sort of entering into the unknown. It’s sort of a nice adventure, even though I’m a Southern California girl, I’ve been here my whole life, and this is a big move for me. And of course my son is very excited. He knows there are lots of parks in San Francisco.

Patch: What do you think is the biggest issue Mount Washington Elementary faces?

Valentino: I think it’s two. One is sustaining the quality of the education, given the funding that we receive and coupled with all the fundraising that we do. That’s always a challenge—to try to fill the gaps. But that’s on the operational side of things. I think the other challenge is to try to keep closing the achievement gap academically.

We’re on the cusp of starting the Common Core State Standards [national standards for K-12 English-language arts and mathematics adopted by 45 states so far]. The teachers have been implementing them slowly in a phased-in process and becoming familiar with them. But when the Common Core standards are fully implemented, the kids will shift over from the standardized testing that they do now to a more authentic form of testing. It’s really going to separate kids. It’s really going to show who’s got a deep understanding of the content and who’s got just that cursory understanding to be able to pick from a list of multiple choice answers.

So that’s an academic challenge that’s coming in the next couple of years by 2014-15, and when that happens it will be a real challenge to close that [academic achievement] gap. I think we might see it widen a little bit. Hopefully not. But I think our teachers are pretty well prepared for those standards. They already teach with text dependency—use complex texts—in a lot of ways. There’s always room for us to grow and learn more but I think our teachers are pretty confident in that realm right now. I don’t think the transition is going to be so difficult from the California State Standards to the Common Core State Standards.

What I like about the Common Core State Standards is that it allows us to slow down a little bit and go deeper into the content. There’s fewer standards for each grade level to cover, which, then, would lead you to believe that you’ll go deeper. Already our curriculum is changing to reflect that. It’s not so much a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s now more about ‘We’re going to really focus’ and get kids to know things like number sense, having fluency of operations in math just as we build fluency in the language arts and reading.

Patch: What do you foresee for Mount Washington Elementary over the next few years?

Valentino: That!

Patch: Closing the gap?

Valentino: Yes.

Patch: What’s your new life going to be like?

Valentino: I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to be a principal. I think what I’ve found is that raising a young child and having a husband with a big job made it really difficult for me to be the principal that I wanted to be and the mom that I wanted to be. It was a real struggle for me. And so I am looking forward to maybe getting a job that is a little shorter on hours—perhaps leading professional development for teachers or even working in an intervention program at a school. But I’m looking forward to having a little more freedom to be a mom for a little while.

And I anticipate there will be another move in the next few years because my husband really is seeking to be a superintendent and I know one of the things that superintendents are famous for is moving around.

Patch: What do you think you’re going to miss the most?

Valentino: The weather.