Helen
Santiago: #1 IN #1
By
Jacob M. Appel
Helen
Santiago and Community School District 1 go back a long ways.
“My
father jumped ship and hid out on Essex Street when he was 17
years old,” explains the district’s superintendent. “He was
from what was then called the South Moluccas, which is now a
part of the United Republic of Indonesia. For political reasons,
when he was 14 he got on a steamer and went around the world
once. He decided New York was where he wanted to be, went back
and said good bye to his family–and then came to the Lower East
Side.” Now Santiago, who is also French Canadian on her mother’s
side and acquired the Hispanic last name through marriage, has
come full circle. She is in charge of all the schools in the
neighborhood where her father and millions of other immigrants
first settled, the gateway to America that remains one of the
most diverse school districts in the United States.
District 1 encompasses “the communities between the [Manhattan
and Williamsburg] bridges” and includes Chinatown, Alphabet
City and the traditional Lower East Side. It extends from the
East River to First Avenue and stretches as far north as 12th
Street. The district’s 24 schools are home to more than nine
thousand children between kindergarten and grade eight. Santiago
also shares responsibility for the district’s two collaborative
high schools, the East Side Community High School and the Martha
Valle School, which cover grades seven through twelve. The superintendent
notes that these two schools stand at the cutting edge of “progressive
middle school reform.”
According to Santiago, middle school reform was widely needed
when she joined the district. “One of the things we’ve suffered
from is that middle schools were begun in seventh grade,” she
explains. “When you begin a middle school in grade seven in
the climate that we are currently living in, you doom those
children. They come in September of seventh grade and they know
no one. A year later they have to fill out applications for
high schools. If they’re coming in challenged already in reading
or any other content area, they’re so enmeshed in making and
creating relationships with each other as kids and with faculty
and staff that this consumes a lot of their thinking time and
their gray matter–and they never catch up.” One of Santiago’s
goals is to establish more schools that begin in the fifth or
sixth grades, when “much greater opportunity still exists to
forge relationships with these children before they reach adolescence.”
This issue is close to Santiago’s heart. She once taught at
a school that transitioned from a junior high school to a middle
school during her tenure.
Santiago’s original training is in elementary education. Yet
after seven and a half years teaching in New York City, she
moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, and then Peoria, Arizona, where
she taught eighth grade language arts with an ancillary emphasis
on English-Spanish bilingual education. She then returned to
New York in the mid-1980s and worked as executive assistant
to District 6 Superintendent Anthony Amato from 1987 to 1990.
She also developed close professional relationships with now
retired superintendents Maria Guasp of District 9 and Jim Mazza
of District 3. These three mentors taught her the most important
lesson for anybody involved in the art of education: “Always
stay focused on kids.” She was also heavily influenced by the
writings of social scientist Peter Senge and his emphasis on
attention to small details. “The question Senge asks,” Santiago
explains, “is, ‘How do you move an ocean liner?’ Not with the
rudder, but with the trim tabs on the rudder. You make massive
movement through paying attention to the little things. And
I think that’s been part of the work that we’ve been trying
to do here in District 1.” When the previous superintendent
of District 1 left two years ago, Santiago was appointed acting
superintendent by Chancellor Harold Levy.
One of Santiago’s first challenges as superintendent was to
resolve a two million dollar budgetary shortfall. She did so
by reducing her own staff and cutting back on over-expenditures.
The superintendent proudly notes that even after these cutbacks,
her district remains first citywide in per capita expenditures
on children; New York spends approximately $11,000 per pupil
in Santiago’s district. Yet she emphasizes that her primary
area of interest and expertise is instruction. “Of course a
successful superintendent has to be good at both,” she notes.
“And a district has to be run on a day-to-day basis as well.”
Her duties also include two annual visits to evaluate each school
under her charge.
One area to which Santiago has devoted her energies is school
choice. While she notes that she opposes the sort of voucher
system that provides money for parents to send their children
to private schools, she insists that parents need to have real
options. “I think that we can do our own equivalent to vouchers
through a choice program in our community school districts,”
she explains. “And I think we can offer a wide range of wonderful
schools for our parents to choose from.” As deputy superintendent
in District 3, Santiago played an active role in expanding the
variety of schools open to parents and their children. She now
hopes to bring a similar range of options to her own district.
She notes that District 1 is now an “open district of choice”
where parents can choose to send their children to almost any
school in the district.
The key to building a successful district, of course, involves
choosing the right leadership team. Flexibility in hiring teachers
and administrators, which has increased in recent years, makes
this possible. So does District 1’s prime location; people want
to work in Manhattan. “And with the right teachers and principals,”
says Santiago, “you can do anything.” It can’t hurt to add the
obvious: in a complex school system like New York’s, even the
best teachers and principals can only do their jobs with the
support of a strong and dedicated superintendent. Santiago seems
to know this, and District 1 is already starting to reap the
benefits in higher test scores, rapid school development and—just
as important in a world of ever expanding choice and competition—a
growing reputation for excellence. #
