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New schools chief Carlos Garcia speaks at a news conference Wednesday. The Los Angeles native has held a number of positions in the field of education.
SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - The new San Francisco superintendent of schools knows what it’s like to be an outsider.
As a Spanish-speaking child growing up in a barrio of Los Angeles, Carlos Garcia sold newspapers on street corners and befriended children involved with gangs. He had no choice, he said, “I was part of the community.”
On Wednesday, a day after the San Francisco school board voted 6-1 to hire its new top executive, Garcia gave an impassioned speech to a crowd of more than 150 people, including city leaders, school administrators and teachers, about an issue he holds dear — the achievement gap.
“Public education is the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “How is it possible that someone like me got to this position? Our schools need to be good for all of our children, not just some of our children.”
Moments earlier, interim schools chief Gwen Chan passed the torch — one, in fact, made by children at McKinley Elementary School — to Garcia, who served as superintendent of the Clark County School District in Nevada from 2000 to 2005.
The 55-year-old educator arrives at the district as it struggles to find a new school assignment process, suffers from declining enrollment and budget constraints, and has been operating without a permanent leader since embattled Superintendent Arlene Ackerman resigned more than a year ago.
After a six-month-long search, the board hired Garcia on Tuesday night for $255,000 a year. He will take over for Chan on July 16.
Garcia began his career as a high school history teacher in Southern California more than 30 years ago. He moved his way up, taking jobs as vice principal, state and federal programs coordinator and head track coach before signing on to lead San Francisco’s Horace Mann Middle School from 1988 to 1991.
Garcia said the Mission district school had a wait list of about 2,000 children by the time he left. He said he is planning to dig deep into the issue of inequity in San Francisco public schools.
“Why aren’t those schools of value, and what can we do immediately to make those schools desirable?” he said.
When peppered with some tough questions regarding gang violence, school choice and union negotiations Wednesday, Garcia responded that he doesn’t have the solutions to every problem.
“I plan to be out in this community everywhere. You’ll see me on a corner in the Mission, in Chinatown, Hunters Point, I’ll be there,” he said.
Carlos Garcia
Age: 55
Hometown: Los Angeles
First job: 1974, student teacher of English-language arts at Ontario High School in Ontario
Current position: Vice president of McGraw-Hill Companies education division
Top education jobs: 1997-2005, superintendent of Clark County, Fresno Unified and Sanger Unified school districts
Offices held: Member of San Mateo County Board of Education (1991), Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce (current) and San Joaquin Valley Goodwill Industries (1998-2000)
San Francisco experience: Principal of Horace Mann Middle School from 1988 to 1991
Languages: English, Spanish
Education: Master of Arts in Education, Claremont Graduate School
SFUSD start date: July 16
Annual salary: $255,000
- Source: SFUSD
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Comments from Examiner Readers
8:25 PM MST on Thu., Jul. 19, 2007 re: "S.F. City Hall, new schools chief off to good start"
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5:41 PM MST on Tue., Jul. 17, 2007
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2:52 PM MST on Tue., Jul. 17, 2007
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2:31 PM MST on Tue., Jul. 17, 2007
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2:18 PM MST on Tue., Jul. 17, 2007
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12:28 PM MST on Tue., Jul. 17, 2007
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7:22 PM MST on Wed., Jun. 13, 2007
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5:56 PM MST on Wed., Jun. 13, 2007
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bruzlee said:
if he going to be like the last one, what's her name, Hackerman? trying to stay until she's retired. this was what's she was after. a school board should be local, someone who's educated here. not someone from kentucky.
161 agree | 181 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
In the end, parents have a much bigger impact on their children's education than schools. Parents who let their children go out on school nights are guaranteeing their children's failure in school. Make them stay at home, and sit with them while they do homework - that will virtually guarantee success. Too many schools, too many administrators, too much money spent on busing. Cut the fat, and push the additional money to bring resources to southeast and other underperforming schools. Years ago, the school board kicked the Boy Scouts out of the schools. They promised a replacement program - none exists today. They kicked out ROTC, without any replacement program. In both cases, they chose the interests of adults over children. That tells you where the interest of the board lies.
167 agree | 161 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
With the Board's political agenda and the teachers union's full-employment agenda, the new guy will have little chance of bringing quality to the schools. He needs to close schools, weed out ineffective employees, cut the administrators, and emphasize academic basics. All "English Learners" should be in English immersion. Nothing holds immigrants back more than their inability to speak English.
173 agree | 171 disagree
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skeptical reader and good speller said:
To equate the dissolution of the ROTC program with racism (sceptical reader - sceptic is right!) is absurd. Others would argue that a military program that targets minorities as more expendable in war time is racist, they are the right ones.
148 agree | 176 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
- He left Horace Mann years ago and it was performing just fine when he left. - Gwen Chan doesn't want the job. I can't imagine why not. - The Superintendent is an administrator. The Board of Education sets policy. Keep that in mind when you are deciding who to criticize. I wish him the best of luck with this District. And why not? Why anticipate failure? If you want our most vulnerable students to succeed, you should hope that a new Superintendent can help them.
173 agree | 134 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
so what did he accomplish at horace mann? it is now one of the lowest performing schools in the district.. guess tht doesn't matter since ackermann left the DC schools in disarray (they still are) and got a better job here (made off like a bandit here too!!!) history repeats itself, all over again, and again, and again
159 agree | 213 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
so what did he accomplish at horace mann? it is now one of the lowest performing schools in the district.. guess tht doesn't matter since ackermann left the DC schools in disarray (they still are) and got a better job here (made off like a bandit here too!!!) history repeats itself, all over again, and again, and again
162 agree | 139 disagree
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Examiner Reader said:
uhh.... that's a lot of money.... i say keep Gwen Chan, she's doing a fantastic job! the one thing the school district needs to clean up is the fact that students still need to travel across the city to attend school rather than attend local schools. that needs to be fixed, JROTC is a good program but we have more important things to fix and that is getting students to the school districts they belong to. If people consider it racist because asians would be attending Lincoln and Lowell and Latinos - mission then i think there needs to be a change in how students get accepted into schools.
213 agree | 173 disagree
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Sceptical reader said:
I give the new superintendent 2 years before he bails out. This school board is more interested in forwarding their political agenda than they are in educating students. At some point in time those interests will clash, and they will throw more kids under the bus, as they have repeatedly done, most recently by eliminating ROTC, a proven, successful program (with nothing to replace it). I don't agree with the US military policy on gays, but the school board ignored their responsibility to students inn order to make political points with the most powerful political group in SF, one that happens to be predominatly White and Male. Denying these predominately minority children the right to hear what ROTC has to say smacks of racism.
195 agree | 179 disagree
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