The Middle-School Principals of Gilroy

The three middle-school principals of Gilroy—Sal Tomasello, Greg Camacho-Light and Greg Kapaku—talk every day. Kapaku commented that the three of them talk to each other more than they talk with their wives. After the interview, the three men left to go to their cars, but 20 minutes later, all three principals were still standing in the parking lot talking.

Next year brings change. In June, Tomasello will retire as principal of Ascencion Solorsano Middle School, and Kapaku will move from South Valley Middle School to Christopher High School, where he will take on the role of assistant principal. Greg Camacho-Light will stay on as principal of Brownell Middle School.

In this interview, the principals share what makes their work worthwhile, and what they’d like to change.

Gilroy Patch: Sal, congratulations on being named educator of the year for 2010 by the Chamber of Commerce.

Sal Tomasello: Thank you.

Greg Camacho-Light: He also got the Region Eight award.

Patch: Which award?

Greg Kapaku: ACSA Middle Grades Administrator of the Year Region Eight Award.

Patch: So Sal, you’re like Mary Tyler Moore—you want to go out while you’re at the top of your game?

(Tomasello shrugs while the other two laugh.)

Patch: What do you like most about being principal?

Kapaku: Every day is different. You never know what challenge will be waiting in your office.

Patch: And that’s a good thing?

Kapaku: It is a good thing.

Camacho-Light: It’s never boring. I’m always tired but never bored.

Kapaku: We should have T-shirts made up. “Always Tired, Never Bored.”

For me, it’s rewarding to watch how much kids grow during the three years they’re with us.

Tomasello: That is the best part for me, too. We get a chance to see how the elementary-school-age children who start sixth grade mature. There’s real growth. Often the sixth-graders who come in are very immature, and they can be very mature young adolescents by the time they leave us to go to high school.

Patch: Greg, how will this change for you when you move to Christopher High?

Kapaku: It’s the same process. What excites me about Christopher is the high school atmosphere and the many things going on: the clubs and activities as well as the sports and performing arts. High school students tend to take a lot of pride in their school. I’m looking forward to being involved with that spirit.

Patch: And you’ve worked with John Perales before.

Kapaku: I’ve survived John before.

(All three laugh.)

Patch: Sal, you’ve been an educator for 39 years, Greg [Camacho-Light], you’ve been an educator for 27 years, and Greg [Kapaku], you’ve been an educator for 16 years. What made you want to teach?

Tomasello: Athletics motivated me as a student. I had several excellent role models, including a cousin who was a teacher and a football coach. Once I began coaching, I was hooked. There was no doubt that I was going to be in education.

Kapaku: My interest in teaching also started with coaching football. I liked working with kids and younger people. Also, the teachers I had in my 12 years in public school made an impression on me. I’m still in touch with some of those teachers, who are administrators now.

Patch: You still talk to your teachers?

Kapaku: I do. I knew I wanted to teach. I had no aspirations of being an administrator. A principal asked me to step in for an admin person who was leaving, which is how my administration career started.

Patch: Do you miss teaching?

Kapaku: I do. I miss it a lot.

Patch: Greg, did you also know you were going to teach from an early age?

Camacho-Light: Not at all. I was one of those kids who bounced from job to job instead of finishing college. I was the manager of a pizza place for a while. Then one day, all of a sudden, I was 30 years old, trying to figure out where I could make a difference, and a friend told me I’d be a good teacher.

“Why?,” I asked him. “You’re a good storyteller,” he said. “You explain things well.”

Tomasello: That fits with your background in theater too. [Camacho-Light taught theater at Gavilan College before starting at Gilroy High School in 1995.]

Camacho-Light: It does. I enjoyed working with young people. I still do.

Tomasello: I think many school administrators begin by interacting with kids in some extracurricular activity—for Greg, it was theater, and for Greg Kapaku and me, it was sports.

Once you begin working with kids, you don’t want to give it up. That’s why I never moved to a district-level job. I have to be around kids.

Patch (to Camacho-Light): Is it true you taught in a one-room schoolhouse for four years?

Camacho-Light: It is true. This was in San Benito County. I had gone to school in a one-room schoolhouse; my father was my teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Panoche Valley, so it wasn’t foreign to me.

Patch: If working with the kids is the best thing, what’s the biggest challenge in your job?

Tomasello: The economic conditions and the stresses that families face right now make our job more difficult. We’re not just school administrators; we sometimes function as counselors. It’s a balancing act to help kids get through the difficulties of growing up.

Camacho-Light: Education today doesn’t compare to education in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s much harder today than it was when I was a kid. We face competition against countries that we didn’t compete against 30 years ago. We have fewer resources and yet higher and higher expectations from parents.

Kapaku: I’m the new guy here with only 16 years of experience, but in that time, it seems that parents—some parents—have relegated all of the education of their children to us. Many feel education is entirely the responsibility of the school. It has to be a partnership between the school and the parents to ensure success.

Tomasello: This is partly due to economic reasons. There’s so much stress on families now with both parents working to make ends meet. People are overwhelmed, and they’re looking to us for all the answers.

Camacho-Light: We hear people say that schools should be run like a business. When we look at Wall Street and see how bankers got their bonuses [even after the federal government gave Wall Street bail-out money], I think it would be nice to get bonuses regardless of the job we do, but the primary motivation for all of us is setting up our students to do well.

Kapaku: Being an educator is an honest living, but nobody sets out to be a principal because of the financial rewards. At the end of the day it’s about the kids who put their trust in us.

Patch: If you could change just one thing about your school, what would you change?

Kapaku: Perception. The public perception of South Valley is so far from reality. We do outreach all the time. Once we have the nonbelievers on campus and they see what we do, their attitude changes.

Camacho-Light: I’d say perception is the biggest problem at Brownell as well. We’re constantly fighting an inaccurate perception. I’ve heard rumors about Brownell that are laughable, except that people believe them; that’s sad.

Patch: At this week’s school board meeting, school board president Rhoda Bress said, “I’ve been to many open houses at Brownell over the years, as a parent and a school board member. This is the first year that people were asking me how they could get into Brownell. In the past, they were asking how they could get out of Brownell.”

Camacho-Light: Brownell has really changed, and eventually the perception changes, too.

Part of this is the allure of a new school. Everyone wants the brand-new shiny thing. If we built another middle school, then Solorsano—as good as it is—would seem second best compared to the new school.

Kapaku: I agree, but Sal has done an awesome job with Solorsano. He made it tough on Greg and I—when people compare our schools to Solorsano--but that’s a good thing, because it makes me work to get my school as close to Sal’s mark as I can.

Tomasello: I was fortunate. I was given the chance to select most of the teachers. You don’t often get that opportunity.

Camacho-Light: I was lucky that he chose me.

Kapaku: He didn’t choose me.

Tomasello: Yes, I did!

Kapaku: That’s right, later you did.

Tomasello: Aren’t you going to ask me what I would change in my school?

Patch: Yes. That was my next question.

Tomasello: When the school board voted to take away 85 percent of electives for middle-school students, I think that was one of the worst decisions the board has ever made (reducing an eight-period day to a seven-period day to save $1.25 million.). We had an ideal model. Every student had choices in electives, and sometimes they were exposed to as many as three electives over the course of three years.

When we took that away, we did a great disservice to our middle-school students.

Kapaku: Now it’s all or nothing. If you’re the kind of student who does well in math and language arts, then you succeed, but many students who are stronger in other subjects such as art don’t get to experience that success in middle school.

Camacho-Light: When they reach high school, then they have art or computer classes, but they’ve lost those years to experience that part of their ability and to build a foundation. They’re coming to the high school with no idea of what art or theater classes can be.

You can tell middle-school kids that in high school they’ll have more choices but it’s like trying to describe the ocean to someone who has never seen it.

Tomasello: We’ve tried to be creative. We offer a theater arts program after school that has about 45 kids, but it’s not the same. (He turns to Camacho-Light.) It must be killing you to not offer those classes.

Camacho-Light: It’s a loss.

Tomasello: It’s a big loss. No computers, no theater, no art classes, no choir. No choir! (Tomasello shakes his head.) We had 225 students in art classes before they were cut.

Camacho-Light: It’s a loss for the high school, too. Kids who haven’t had choir or art classes in middle school are less likely to sign up in high school.

Tomasello: If I could change anything in our district, I would figure out a way to bring back electives to the middle schools.

Patch: Watching the three of you, it’s clear you have a strong connection.

Kapaku: There’s a lot of collaboration. We talk to each other more than we talk to our wives.

(All three men laugh.)

Patch: You’ve worked together through the years.

Tomasello: We have.

Kapaku: I got to take over Sal’s office when he left South Valley. He left a lot of wisdom in that room.

Tomasello (to Kapaku): Did you ever get a skylight?

Kapaku: No, but I removed the second door.

Tomasello: When Greg went to Brownell, there was a very smooth transition. That’s when the three of us began working together more closely. There’s been a dialogue between the teachers in the three schools as well as between principals.

Kapaku: We provide the channels for the teachers to interact.

Patch: What channels?

Kapaku: Early release days in which teachers at specific grade levels get together to discuss tests, instructional strategies, student strengths and weaknesses. We deal with the logistics so the teachers have time together.

Camacho-Light: We all wanted that kind of interaction for the teachers, and all of us worked toward it. The demands on teachers can mean they’re in silos a lot of the time; to allow them some time out of the silo to work with other teachers makes their classroom time more productive.

Tomasello: We’ve all done a good job of selecting strong teacher leaders.

Kapaku: The buy-in comes from the teachers. It’s key to have the teachers invested.

Patch: Next year will be different. Maria Walker will replace Sal at Solorsano and Anisha Munshi will replace Greg at South Valley.

Camacho-Light: I was planning to tell the new principals that they should do whatever I say, but with both Maria and Anisha in the loop already, I won't be able to pull that off.

(All three laugh.)

Tomasello: I am extremely pleased that Dr. Flores and the BOE chose Maria and Anisha. We have selected two very dedicated educational professionals.

Patch: Sal, when you retire in June, you’re planning on traveling?

Tomasello: I hope to.

Patch: What’s the first trip planned?

Tomasello: Mexico. The whole family is going to Puerta Vallarta this summer.

Patch: And when you return, will it feel strange to not be heading off to school?

Tomasello: I’ll still be involved. I have three grandchildren in Gilroy public schools, so I have a vested interest.

Patch: Do you think the three of you will still call and email each other?

Camacho-Light: We will.

Kapaku: Absolutely.

Tomasello: Oh, yeah. I’ll be knocking on their doors.

Kapaku: Sal has a master key to every secondary school in the district. We haven’t seen the last of him.