After Principal Patricia Kurtz announced her plans to retire, members of the Aragon community began searching for their next principal. Through a survey, parents, students and faculty were invited to share their opinions on what qualities they thought would be important for the next Aragon principal. A meeting was held on Feb. 26 to discuss with the Aragon faculty the process of finding the next principal. At that meeting, it was announced that there would be three committees created to help with the process. The committee for finding a new principal was broken into two main groups: a paper screening committee and a committee to interview the candidates.
Students of all grade levels were asked to participate as committee members, but they needed to be part of the leadership class.
“Ms. Perino recommended that I [should] be on the committee because [even though] they had students from other grades already in committees so they wanted to get a freshman view to make sure that all grades were represented,” said freshman Joseph Neamati. “I think that the student involvement was pretty important because the principal improves the lives and education of all students on campus.”
Faculty and parents were also asked to participate on the committees as well.
“I definitely think it was important for parents to be a part of the committees just as I think it was important for students, teachers and staff since they are all affected by the decision and will be working with the person selected,” said Committee and PTSO member Jenny Rokala.
The paper screening committee finished its work March 16. The community received applicants for the position of principal from both internal and external candidates.
“By the time of the school closures, the paper screening [committee] had already met and made a decision about who should be interviewed,” said math teacher Rafael Montelongo Mendez.
Once the seven candidates were chosen, the school board worked with the interview committees to compile a list of questions to pose to the candidates.
“We had a document the school board sent to us with a bunch of questions and a few written prompts, and from there, each of the members of the committees were asked to rank [each] question [by] importance,” said a student member of the committee. “From that feedback, the board [choose] the questions that were given to the candidates.”
After receiving feedback from the committees, the school board decided which questions to send to the interview committees to use for the in-person interviews.
“Initially, we scheduled the interviews in person but had to change tack and conduct interviews virtually when we realized the need for social distancing to keep everyone safe. This was new for everyone, but everyone seemed to manage the switch really well,” Rokala said.
The solution was that each candidate was given the school board’s questions and asked to submit a 45-minute video of their responses.
“The candidates video-recorded their answers to our questions and then we watched them from our homes,” Rokala said.
“We got a nice amount of responses to review and also a wide diversity because you could see, even from the candidates, that they were all quite different. Seeing their responses [the committees] got an idea of what they were about,” Neamati said.
Once all the committee members had reviewed the videos, the committees met together to discuss their opinions of the candidates.
“Zoom meetings were held for each committee led by Kirk Black to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. Finally, we each had to rank the candidates. They then tabulated the results to narrow down the candidates so they could conduct a final interview of the top choices,” Rokala said.
The final rankings of the candidates were sent to the superintendent and the members of the school board to make the final decision.
On April 15, San Mateo Union High School District Superintendent Kevin Skelly announced Valerie Arbizu would be the next principal of Aragon High School. Arbizu has been an assistant principal at Burlingame High School for the last six years.
“I’m really excited about coming over to Aragon High school next year and meeting all of the students in person at some point,” Arbizu said.
While the process of finding Aragon’s next principal did not go as planned, the school board and committees achieved the goal of finding the new principal, allowing the community to be part of the process.
