In 2017, Gabriel Trujillo got a phone call from Tucson Unified School District Governing Board member Michael Hicks.
It was a real pick-me-up kind of conversation.
Superintendent H.T. Sanchez had just been run out of town. The board was looking for a replacement and was running into problems.
Hicks told Trujillo that basically, no one who knows the TUSD board wants to work with them, and so the plan was to do a nationwide search. The board needed a body to fill in as interim superintendent. This wasn’t a long-term thing.
It was a real pep talk, though Trujillo appreciated the blunt honesty.
The truth was, no one lasted long running the Tucson area’s largest school district. Mayflies, with their 24-hour lifespan, seemed to last longer than superintendents at TUSD.
Sanchez was the third superintendent in seven years and he was on his way out. Beth Fagan had been an up-and-coming prodigy but the budget got hacked to pieces at the peak of the Great Recession. She bailed for a part of the world that likes K-12 schools. John Pedicone had been a miracle worker at the Flowing Wells Unified School District. TUSD chewed him up and spat him out in the blink of an eye staring at the sun. Sanchez lasted three whole years but a new board majority elected in 2016 forced his resignation three months after being seated.
Wanna step into a wood chipper, Mr. Trujillo?
The weird part was, he did.
“I really only expected to maybe finish the year,” Trujillo told me in a phone interview. “They did not give me any indication that I would be considered for the full-time position.”
A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. Trujillo got the job. He’s been there for six years. Under his leadership, the ship that wouldn’t started to arc a path through the water and found True North.
It’s the kind of thing that isn’t possible when a new boss comes in every year or two.
That kind of turnover at the top “creates a really negative culture and climate – a culture and climate of ambivalence and resistance,” Trujillo said.
Trujillo talked about working hard to to build relationships with the kids, teachers, school board members and the broader community. Knowing he couldn’t fix everything, he focused on the one thing dogging the district for decades.
That bridge-building is what got Trujillo the permanent gig, he said. It came on the recommendation of teachers and administrators, who liked what they saw in his collaborative approach.
It’s also helped TUSD’s test scores surge and repaired relations with the community so much that a $480 million school bond just passed public muster with a margin of nearly 20 percentage points. That measure will provide additional funding for
school construction and renovations in the district, along with buying
new equipment and buses.
Turnarounds like this don’t happen without leadership.
Trujillo describes his style as “Go slow to go fast later.”
It’s one of those things that reads like corporate or academic buzzwords, but he means building trust and relationships first so bigger changes can follow, and change is on firmer footing because it’s not just some individual superintendent’s crazy idea.
The idea runs contrary to the “move fast and break things” mantra that inspires so many in Silicon Valley. TUSD had been pretty well broken before Trujillo took the post full time in September 2017.
Trujillo’s course: Achieve out of deseg
During Trujillo’s first year, the state Board of Education gave 21 TUSD schools education letter grades of D or E. Last year, the district posted 10 D’s and no E’s at its 81 schools.
And think about this: A pandemic lay in between. All we hear about is the lousy student achievement since coronavirus lockdowns. TUSD is doing better since.
He went slow and honed his focus in the early days.
“I was very honest with the team,” Trujillo said.” Instead of doing 10 or 15 different initiatives, we’re going to do one thing. And the one thing we are going to do is get us out of court supervision.”
That one thing was to get out from under desegregation court orders.
TUSD had spent more than 40 years under a deseg mandate imposed by federal courts. So long as they had to bounce so many proposed policies off a U.S. District Court judge and appointed special master, the district wasn’t going to start moving again.
“If the entire case is about African-American and Latino-American kids not excelling, then we gotta change that,” Trujillo said in describing his approach.
Oh, is that all? No biggie. That’s just something which has plagued school district across the country. For systemically racist reasons, students from those communities tend to experience the stress of poverty that can affect subject mastery.
There’s a whole raft of research on kids dealing with poverty and development of the cerebral cortex.
So how do you do help students who struggle begin to achieve?
Trujillo focused on intervention rather than remedial education. Remedial education takes students back to the beginning. It’s pulling kids out of trigonometry to reteach them algebra. In direct intervention, a teacher grabs a couple kids in class, takes them over to a corner and gets them up to speed on the trig problem right before them, rather than taking the student back to zero.
Trujillo got teachers to hunker down and focus on that single goal of getting free from the courts, and in 2022 the district did just that.
It’s had a carry-over effect on broader student achievement because when Latino and African-American students do better, all students benefit. In 2018, the district had just eight A-rated schools. That number is now up to 14. There were just 21 B schools five years ago and in 2022-23 there were 35.
More teachers, more choices
Since, he’s been able to speed up some and tackle other projects.
TUSD has been trying to attack the teacher shortage rather than waiting for the market to fix it through somehow graduating more students from education colleges.
“We came up with this thing where we said: ‘What if we made it easier to become a teacher so you didn’t have to navigate multiple organizational barriers to get your teacher certificate?'” the superintendent told the Sentinel.
So the district has undertaken an initiative for people with bachelor’s degrees to get their teacher certificates free of charge by going through a two-year training program.
It’s graduated 28 teachers. TUSD is short between one and one and a half teachers per school, Trujillo said. So 28 might not seem like a lot of teachers, but it’s an amount that can make a difference.
He’s also gone after the conventional wisdom that the district exists to create college freshmen and created Innovation Tech High School, which focuses on getting students certified in trades from coding to 3D printing and other trades so they can start earning money fast.
No, it’s not always about getting TUSD students into four-year degree programs. Convincing the TUSD community of such a reality proved a “cultural leap,” Trujillo said.
“The purpose of a school district is to open multiple options for students,” Trujillo said.
No news, good news
The absence of drama out of the district headquarters is another of Trujillo’s achievements. He’s stilled choppy waters.
When was the last time there was a row, a spat, an uproar, a donnybrook, a verbal fisticuffs or even a freaking kerfuffle on the TUSD governing board? It’s been years.
And the district now seems to have the confidence of voters, for a change. TUSD’s Prop. 496 was approved by 59 percent of them.
Trujillo doesn’t hear parents and community members talk of politics in casual conversations anymore. It is no longer at the top of mind, he said.
“To me that’s the biggest indicator things had changed – when I used to talk to people they would talk about the board. Now they talk about teachers,” Trujillo said. “We’re not supposed to be the news.”
Oops.