From the Desk Of

By James Baker and Alexandra Baker

From its inception in the early 1960’s, Pajaro Valley Unified School District has experienced a plethora of tribulations and triumphs. As an educator and administrator for thirty years at Pajaro Valley, James S. Bake reflects on the different ventures and incidents that shaped the District and made it one of the biggest employers and advocates for education in the region.

Intended to be a savory bite of history on Pajaro Valley and a reflection on his experience at the District for the public to consume, this book balances the personal stories of Baker with events that impacted the Districts vision to educate their diverse students with equity and excellence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James S. Baker
• Release date: Feb 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370468690

James Baker

James Bruce Baker was born on December 17, 1925, and has never lived it down.He was born in a wee, little one-horse town by the name of Darrouzzuett [he wasn’t sure of the spelling], Texas. That’s up in the North-East corner of the Texas panhandle, just about where the Oklahoma panhandle begins across the State Line.In his first six years of life he had typhoid fever, double pneumonia, and the red measles. They say he had to learn to walk twice. He doesn’t know, since he’s not sure he was there.He started grade school in the town of Shamrock, Texas through the heart of which ran the once famous Highway 66 [now called I-40}.When WWII started, he was just entering High School in Shamrock.In 1943, he left home and went to Amarillo, Texas and got a job in a grain elevator of a 200,000 bushel capacity. He didn’t smoke in those days, and that was a good thing, because the chaff from grain such as wheat is highly flammable.That year, he went home for Xmas and was late getting back to his grain elevator job. He was fired. He walked across the tracks and immediately got a job in the FT. WORTH AND DENVER Railroad roadhouse. He was there about six months when he was drafted, as had been many of the boys before him on that job. When the war was over, and he asked for his job back, they laughed at him.He had one year of high school at the time, and with his G.I. privileges, he was able to start college as a freshman. He made up his lost high school years when he came out to California and started to college there. He received a Public School District certificate of High School completion.He finished four years of college besides and went into Grad School, but S.F. State College at that time was strictly a teachers college, and he had to have a teaching credential to graduate with an MA, so he quit school at the age of 30 and went into real estate. He sold real estate in the bay area and in Sacramento for 31 years. At which time, in 1984, he was hospitalized with a perforated ulcer, and quit real estate, and he quit smoking. They cut his Vegas nerve, and he hasn’t gambled since [look it up, it’s real.]He started writing his first novel when he was ten years old, and he had his own secret method of writing so that no one else could read it. He went from right to left, starting at the bottom of the page. When he was away to war, his younger sister threw it away. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it, of course...so he couldn’t blame her.He had a love life of sorts, but nothing to write home or away from home about. He fought all his life to get ahead. He had complete, or bits of novels lying around of about 12 in number.ProMart was his real estate office’s designation, so he took the name when he started being a small press editor and publisher in 1995, and he never looked back. He always imagined that he was too tard, considering he worked about 40 hours a week at a Taco Bell affiliate.The rest of it is of public record.James Bruce Baker died of complications from colon cancer on September 18, 2002

Book preview

From The Desk Of

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An Administrator’s Pursuit of Excellence & Equity in Pajaro Valley Unified School District

1960-1990

From The Desk Of

by James S. Baker and Alexandra Baker

Copyright 2018 James S. Baker

Smashwords Edition 

To all Pajaro Valley Unified School District Staff, Teachers, Administrators, Personnel, Trustees (Especially the original seven who established the school district), and to the supportive and passionate community members.

To all the Students who have walked through our doors, sat in our desks, played on our campuses, graduated from our high schools.

This is for you. To our family.

Alexandra’s Note

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This book is a compilation of feelings that have been sitting dormant in my Grandfather for 25 years. While I have grown up hearing the stories, their impact and their true meaning have been buried deep within my Grandfather’s memories and experiences.

Unintentionally, this history morphed into a personal story (for one cannot help but weave personal experience into a history they are pulling from their memory). I identified the need to back my Grandpa’s experience with factual evidence, so my voice appears as what I can only hope is a neutral (enough) narrator.

This is history, this is Jim Baker’s story; this is our story and we must admit that it is only our own. We did not discuss or include others from the community or administration for comment to shift the points in this narrative. We have not included all Board meetings or important choices and changes made within the district. I do rely on two dissertations (Ruben Donato and Clayton Hurd) and a plethora of news articles (from the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Register-Pajaronian). I avoided any personal or retrospective thoughts from others. This was done for two reasons: I did not want to muddle Grandpa’s point of view, and, to be completely fair, we would need to use testimony from all demographics and people effected by Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD)—this would be an arduous and more subjective task than the point of view of one administrator. Because of these choices, this book is completely unique. Although it may not touch on every situation or problem PVUSD faced, it touches on the ones Grandpa identified as important—the ones that affected him and others. This book, at its core, from its true beginnings, is about sharing. It is about asking people to take a moment and question how education molds and binds us to others. It is about identifying problems in the school system and not fixing them, but observing them.

Often, a point will go unexplained or without proper explanation. That was a choice made by me: sometimes you must let what happened stand on its own. If at any point you see a name or group that you do not recognize, refer to the appendix section for more information. There are many players in this narrative and although I attempt to share their role when they are introduced that does not always happen.

And, even though he desperately tried to avoid it, this book is about my Grandfather. Someone who I admire and cherish with all my heart. Someone who I know as Grandpa, someone who you now know as James Jim Baker, administrator and, Superintendent of Pajaro Valley Schools. It has been an honor to get to know that part of him and to share it with you.

With love and gratitude, 

Alexandra Baker

Preface

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During my 10-year tenure as Superintendent of Pajaro Valley Unified School District, I was frequently invited to University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) study groups with professors. At these meetings, I would learn that they were frustrated at the lack of students from PVUSD attending UCSC and that those who did attend were not prepared for university. I would visit UCSC with its large new buildings, its beautiful walnut furniture, and artwork on the walls. We would sit in overstuffed leather chairs and I would listen to them berate me and explain to me how I needed to prepare my students for university. One day I blew up. I said, You have a lot of nerve telling me what to do. Come with me. Walk in my shoes. Come to my office—which is a converted Naval base building. No walnut furniture in sight.

Come see my kids—kids from radically different cultures forced to do busing for at least two hours a day. Kids who rely on our breakfast programs to be fed. Tell me how to create bilingual kids overnight as I’m expected to do—when we both know that it takes more than six months, years, even generations, to create outstanding citizens.

I refused to sit there and bow down to someone else telling me what to do. I had spent years, since the inception of the district searching for the materialization of this dream—the dream to have a school system that’s organized, fair, and efficient. I pushed for a curriculum to be developed. I pushed to help teachers be properly trained in bilingual education to meet the needs of minority kids. I pushed for equity and fairness within my schools.

But this dream needed support—financial and within the community.

Five times we went to the community, practically begging for money and they refused, citing we were not doing our job because we created false expectations in unifying that were not fulfilled. (After I left the district in 1990 they passed two massive bond issues that helped relieve a large chunk of the financial burden.)

On a personal level, I internalized a lot of what took place during my time at the district. Now, at 82 years old and 27 years out of the district, I think I can write with detail and remember clearly what took place because I had no idea how much I was holding within me. It is amazing to me that I can recall, as accurately as possible, what took place during PVUSD’s first thirty years.

Retrospect allows me to see the various roadblocks that did not enable us to unify the system as quickly as I think the community expected. Back then, if we did explain what was stopping us, it sounded like excuses as to why we weren’t successful or why the kids weren’t learning more. We were dealing with the state and federal government in one direction and a split community in the other. These two antagonists prevented us from putting our energy into proper leadership and management of the school systems. However, I am not writing this book to make excuses. Unfortunately,

the government got in the way of operating the local school district. It happened. Building a big federally supported housing project caused Freedom Elementary School to be racially isolated and then we were told to desegregate the school. I don’t think people realized what management in the district, including myself, had to do—who we had to please and who we had to support. This writing is an opportunity to bring out all the efforts of the central level management in the school system. (We even tried to protect our principals from what we were dealing with, for instance not informing them when the Office of Civil Rights cited us as in non-compliance!)

We did the best we could to handle the problems the District faced. We were honest about it. We were fair. We weren’t discriminating, or at least I don’t think so. For instance, the budget system that I helped create in the district was primarily designed to placate all the criticism that the Mexican kids in Watsonville were getting all the money. We had a formula in place to ensure that each school got the exact same amount of supply money—designed to promote equality, an issue we were constantly failing to secure within the community.

 My vision for this book started as sharing my story, as a platform to inform, educate and provide a history for the first 30 years of PVUSD. Like a lot of soldiers that went to war, when the soldiers returned home, they didn’t want to talk about it. Well, I sort of went to war in PVUSD, and I didn’t want to talk about it—not at the dinner table with my sons and wife, not with my grandchildren as they grew up, not with anyone until people who I worked with within the district started to encourage me.

When I sat in an over-stuffed leather chair with walnut furniture and art on the walls, at an affluent university just up the bay from us, I spoke up for people who mattered to me. The public schools needed support from the state. If the university wanted the system to create better students, they had to turn their funds for walnut furniture into desks and supplies for students. We didn’t have the money that UCSC had to do what they expected of us What you need to do, I explained, is not to lower your expectations, but come and help us appropriately teach our students in the way they deserve.

Education has never just been about sitting kids down in a classroom and educating them. It’s about support systems that are intertwined far beyond the classrooms walls—employers, governments, communities, families, cultures—honorable, good, deserving people reaching out their hands to others. Education is about being fair, equitable, loving. And, yes, it is about money. It is about providing sufficient spaces and funds to support teachers and students. It is about passing laws and provisions and mandates and it is about being honest with the administration and telling us when were wrong.

My hope is that if the government approaches PVUSD five years from now and demands all schools to integrate to reduce racial isolation that PVUSD could turn to these stories as reference. They can think Hey, this is what they did and it didn’t work, or This is what they tried and it was impossible. There’re histories that have been written about Watsonville and Aptos/Rio del Mar and histories about the Chinese and Mexican immigrants. But nothing has been done about one of the major employers: Pajaro Valley Unified School District. The school district was the second biggest employer in the county (until the university came) with nearly 2,000 employees.

I would hope that part of this experience is that people recognize that the Pajaro Valley Unified School District has an important place in the community: that it, and the students who have grown into community members, matter and that they are honored.

The fact that the Pajaro Valley District still exists after nearly 50+ years is a testament to a fine group of dedicated teachers, good administration, and trustees willing to spend countless hours to make the system work for students.

James S. Baker,

Retired Superintendent of Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Foreward

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On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered one of the most important speeches of his administration. He announced the Voting Rights Act and declared how he wanted to push legislation to expand social, political, and economic rights. He wanted to wage a War on Poverty, end racial injustice, and envisioned a Great Society where people from all backgrounds could achieve their fullest potential in American life. Toward the end of his speech, the President informed the American people that he personally knew something about education, poverty, and discrimination. In a rare moment in American history, the President of the United States shared the follow story with the nation:

My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American School. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that