June 3, 2004

Leland Principal Susan Votaw bids adieu

By Kymberli W. Brady
Staff Writer

As the school year winds to a close, some kids will put away their books for the summer while others will say goodbye as they pack their bags for college. Like many seniors after four years at Leland High School, Principal Susan Votaw will also say goodbye as she retires after 35 years teaching in San Jose.

“She’s a great lady and I’m sorry to see her go,” says SJUSD Board Member Gary Rummelhoff. “What I appreciate most about Susan is that she came to Leland with experience and was able to deal very respectfully with the community. At times, they can be very demanding and she did a great job stepping up and working with them.”

Rummelhoff agrees that most schools deserve to have the same principal for seven or eight years in order to truly profit from that individual. “I think it’s too bad that she’s leaving before Leland got their full due,” he adds.

“However, we’ve probably captured her best years as principal and benefited from the four years we had her. She’s done a great job.”

Born in San Francisco, Votaw and her family moved to Palo Alto, where she attended Walter Hayes Middle School, and then Notre Dame and Belmont high schools. She graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in art and a minor in English before returning home to begin her teaching career at Hoover Middle School.

After a brief hiatus and a return to college, she received her master’s degree from San Jose State University in counseling and education for disadvantaged youth.

Votaw spent the next 11 years at John Muir Middle School, teaching art, English, and special education. In 1976, she inaugurated SWAP, or Students With Alternative Programs, designed for kids who weren’t making the grade—runaways, unmanageable and delinquent students whom society had long given up trying to reform. “Kids could swap their class if they weren’t doing alright and come to me instead,” she says. The program was so popular with the students, that they changed the acronym to read, “Susan Will Always Provide.”

According to a 1978 article in the California Teacher’s Association publication, “Action,” she was, “a little off-beat and talked off-the-cuff. But you couldn’t help liking her, because she took society’s leftovers and turned them into first-class dishes.”

Offbeat? Maybe. But she had a way with her kids and wasn’t afraid to bend the rules to stay connected—which sometimes resulted in reprimands, including the time she brought in the “snake man,” complete with sidewinders and rattlers. “All those kids who were normally wild were suddenly raising their hands and saying, ‘sir, sir,’” she laughs. “The assistant principal came in and found 40 kids in a room with 30 venomous snakes. You’re not supposed to do things like that.”

Votaw later served as vice principal at Broadway Opportunity School and Lincoln High School before returning to Broadway as principal. In 2000, she accepted the position of principal at Leland High School.

With a foundation, a transformation board, teachers, administrators, a booster club and a parent’s club, she found herself suddenly transformed from a school of 350 students to that of an entire community. “When I got here, it was a little difficult trying to figure out who was on first,” she admits. Standing out there on that first day, there were so many people I thought I must be the mayor of a small city. I had not seen that many kids before in one spot.”

With the help of the administrative and leadership teams, Votaw at first wasn’t too keen on having so many cooks in the kitchen. “When it started, they told me this really needed to be about community service and the community needed to have a say in how I ran the school,” she admits. “I can remember thinking, ‘say what? I don’t go telling them at IBM what to do.’ But when you start collaborating on how to make things better, the more minds you have and the more people you can interact with, the richer the input. I think that experience stands out.”

According to Dr. Linda Murray, superintendent of San Jose Unified School District, Votaw came to Leland “right in the middle of some major visionary work that the school and community were doing and she grabbed a hold of the vision and ran with it. She helped to take Leland from a good high school to a great high school.”

Accomplishments
A lot has happened during her four-year ascendancy. In her first year, Leland became a nationally recognized New American High School and received a Specialized Secondary Program [SSP] grant—money that started its filmmaking and animation program. In 2002, the school was awarded a six-year “clear” Western Association of Schools and Colleges [WASC} evaluation. “That was a huge, huge thing,” she exclaims. “I’ve never known a school to get a clear.”

In 2003, Leland became a California Distinguished School and won the Exemplary Career Technical Education Award for outstanding high school—one of only four selected in the Nation. This year, they will qualify for National Blue Ribbon status. “The fact that we’re acknowledged that way means things are going well,” she admits. “It doesn’t mean the awards are here because I’m here. It’s because this staff works and moves things forward.”
Three particular accomplishments Votaw admittedly takes pride in include a CCS championship in girls’ soccer, a 35 percent rise in AP class participation, and a number one ranking in the nation for their speech and debate team. “That’s not like first in the city or first in the state,” she exclaims. “It’s first in the United States of America. That’s awesome.”

Votaw also remains excited about Leland Bridge, growing Chinese parent community that helps out financially by renting the facility, volunteering around the school and publishing a quarterly newsletter. “They’re getting information out to some first language families that we were never able to get to before,” she explains. “It’s been wonderful.”

Problem solver and friend
Votaw is not happy just being a principal in the front office. She’s a problem solver—and sometimes a friend—priding herself on being someone kids can come to when they need something. “If you have a question, ask it,” she says. “If you need something, you come to me, you come to him, you come to her—get to one of us. And the kids come. My antenna is always up.”

Votaw remembers one student who was failing a high-powered class and wanted to drop it as it threatened his college plans. “You don’t get to do that,” she remembers telling him. “This is not college. The plane is in the air and you have to finish it. He was a bright kid,” she adds. “But I had to be sensitive as to whether he had a breaking point.”

Votaw stayed involved with him and kept the channel of communication open. When he finished the course with a B, he learned, through her guidance, that whatever happened—if he ever found himself in a hole—he knew he could dig his way out. “Those opportunities are the most rewarding,” she says. “When you get to a place where you’ve made a difference. It’s not too often where I get to have a great relationship with a kid in order to help him work through something. That’s when you say, ‘this is what it’s all about.’”

She admits that with 1,800 students, she doesn’t always know them by name, but they know if they need something, they can come—and they do. “They come to moan and complain,” she admits. “But every once in a while, they say, ‘come and see this.’ I love it when a kid comes and gets me to see something neat that they’re doing. That’s the best part.”

Dealing with tragedy
Admittedly, the most difficult times during her career at Leland have revolved around death. With three this year alone, Votaw says having the ability to bring in trained people from the district, Almaden Valley Counseling Service, and the Center for Living with Dying has helped a great deal.

Although he graduated years ago, the loss of Pat Tillman affected the entire gamut of the Leland population, including teachers who went to school with him, former coaches, and current students who attended his mother’s class at Bret Harte, where he often visited. A very emotional time for everyone, according to Votaw.

“Death is always extremely difficult,” she explains. “It’s really hard if your friend has died to sit and listen to something about the Nile River—that clash between the really deep things in life and distant things that you’re learning about. It’s too huge of a gap. All we can do is be strong and help the kids through it.”

Murray says it would have been a lot harder to get through the deaths without Votaw. “She has always cared a lot about the emotional needs of the kids. She helped the school community get through every crisis in a way that was genuine and extraordinary.”

Passing the torch
Replacing a principal like Votaw won’t be easy says Murray, but the search is on and “we know what we’re looking for.”

When asked if she has any advice for the incoming principal, Votaw is quick to point out the need to understand the culture at Leland—to look for what exists and what pieces need to be moved forward. “It’s always about shining the pot,” she says. “Cleaning the yard a little bit and making what’s good better. You don’t do that by coming in with any pre-conceived ideas. You do that by working people and discovering what they think needs to happen next.”

Her advice includes constant communication with the departments and the students in an effort to get a better grasp of what they want to see evolve. “You just have to have your ears open and pay attention to what people are looking for and what they want,” she notes.” There have been a couple of times where I haven’t done that. When you don’t listen well enough and you don’t check things out well enough, you have messes to clean up.”
Plans for the future

For Votaw, retirement won’t find her becoming sedentary. She has a large agenda, including a list of future accomplishments that will find her heading back to Santa Clara University to finish her master’s in pastoral ministries and traveling to Mexico for language immersion classes in Spanish. She admits that her list of goals began to look more daunting than supervising 1,800 kids on a daily basis. “In lining things up, I started getting stressed,” she claims. “So I decided this coming year would be a gift. I have no plans. I’m going to do whatever happens—whatever doors open and whatever looks good on the other side, I may be doing.

Votaw will continue to live with her sister Nancy, their friend Bob, a tomcat named Peaches, a Balinese kitten named Maggie, and her Great Dane, Jeffrey. “He’s such a fun dog,” she exclaims. “Whoever does Marmaduke knows these guys. Jeffrey is a champion now, so he’s got time off too. He’s just a doll.”

A gourmet cook, she also plans to spend more time back in the kitchen and more time outside walking—things that always took a back seat to her career. “It will be nice to just settle down,” she says. “I’ve been bossing people around for the past 25 years and they say this is going to be difficult. No one is going to answer my walkie-talkie anymore. I’m going to have to do things for myself.”

Staying connected
Although she will be stepping down, Votaw doesn’t plan to stray far from her alma matter. “I would like to be on the Leland Foundation,” she admits. “I’d like to stay connected with the school.”

As president of the Leland foundation, Rummelhoff says Votaw has done an exemplary job in developing and implementing the community’s vision for Leland and he will continue to value her involvement with the school. “Consider the invitation extended to be a part of the foundation,” he says. “She would be welcome and it would be a benefit to the foundation to have her continuity, especially as the new principal comes aboard.”

“To get to be principal at Leland High School has been a great gift,” Votaw adds. “I’ve worked with really wonderful kids, a very supportive community, and great teachers. It’s a wonderful way to get to end your career—start as an art teacher and end as the principal of Leland High School. My mother would have things to tell the bridge club. This would have made her proud.”