Just after 9 a.m. on a Thursday morning a group of transitional kindergarten (TK) students sat in a row on the grass outside Lunada Bay Elementary School in Palos Verdes. They are mostly four and five years old and they just experienced their first fire drill.
“Look at all these well-behaved kids,” Don Austin, new superintendent of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District said, smiling at the youngsters.
Austin took the reigns as superintendent in August. He spends many mornings, like Thursday, visiting schools in his district. His previous positions in education had him working with mostly high school-age students, and Austin has been enjoying getting to know the little ones.
“There is a shift to the importance of safety and routine at this age,” he said. “What really impresses me is the level of sophistication the kids already have, not just in their academic ability but in their ability to articulate what they’re learning about.”
Austin was welcomed by Lunada Bay principal Nancy Parsons, who just began her third year at the school. She led him from classroom to classroom, introducing the students to their new superintendent and having the teachers explain what’s going on in the class. But Austin is careful to interact with each group without disturbing the learning environment too much.
“I almost can’t walk into a classroom without destroying it,” he said.
Instead of big formal introductions, Austin likes to make a more subtle entrance, walking from table to table asking kids what they’re working on. In a combination second and third grade class, he watched students write stories and edit each other’s work. In another classroom, a teacher was reading a Peter Rabbit book to a group of students.
“I remember you,” one little boy said to Austin. “You played basketball with us last week.”
Back in the car and heading to the Palos Verdes Intermediate School, Austin spoke candidly about his new position and some of the controversy over previous superintendent Walker Williams being kept on the district payroll under the new position of Chief Executive Officer of Instructional Projects.
“I get it, it’s two big salaries,” he said. “I can control my own actions and behaviors and I’ll be judged for that. I can’t be judged for decisions I had no part in. But [those questions] are fair game.”
Though the school board said Williams was kept on to help Austin transition into his new position, the two men spend very little time together.
“He’s probably the nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” Austin said of Williams. “But he has his responsibilities and I have mine.”
Austin said Williams spends much of his time responding to public records requests.
“There are a disproportionate number of public record requests in this district,” he said. “And I am not going to engage in any kind of game playing.”
At Palos Verdes Intermediate School, Austin was greeted by Principal Frank Califano and Assistant Principal Salvatrice Kuykendall. A group of students from the journalism class came over to interview Austin on camera for their program “Sea King News.”
In the journalism classroom, a Mac lab filled with eager reporters, producers and camera operators, two students were finishing edits of campaign speeches for Associated Student Body (ASB) elections. Instead of the usual speeches given at a school assembly, the candidates’ speeches were recorded for the school television program.
Mehak Dedmari and Mazzy Genovese, both 13, are the producers of the campaign speeches. They collaborated to edit the footage using Final Cut Pro and proudly showed off the finished product: vignettes of students excitedly telling their peers why they should vote for them. One candidate rapped his entire speech.
While Austin weaved in and out of classrooms, he took photos with his cellphone to upload to Twitter. He uses Twitter to showcase to parents what happens in a typical school day in the district and often uses the hashtag “world class.”
“This is going to be a world class school district,” Austin said, driving back to his office. “We want this to be a place where others come to see how to do things. If people are going to get on a plane to come see us, we need to be a place that is constantly stretching and looking farther down the road. And we need to get out of the habit of being reactionary.”
You can follow Superintendent Don Austin on Twitter @donaustin_pvp.
