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When one of my former adult ESL students told me her daughter was attending Belle Haven Elementary School, my heart sank. I knew that Belle Haven is part of the Ravenswood City School District and based on what I thought I knew about the district–As an educator, I’ve always been curious about the district given its unique challenges–I assumed that the likelihood of this little girl succeeding academically was about as likely as my getting a Pulitzer for writing about inspiring people. But when I went online to learn more about the district, I discovered something extraordinary: it receives almost 20 percent of its budget–about $10 million for the 2024-2025 school year–from the local non-profit Ravenswood Education Foundation (REF). Clearly Silicon Valley movers and shakers had gotten behind a school district that I had dismissed as a lost cause. This story is about the successful public/private partnership between the Ravenswood City School District and REF, the partnership’s impact on Ravenswood students, and the two visionary leaders spearheading the effort. If you’re curious about how this little girl fared, but aren’t that interested in the partnership, just jump to the postscript at the end of the story!
If it weren’t for the Ravenswood Education Foundation (REF), students at the Ravenswood City School District’s three elementary schools wouldn’t have weekly music, art, and PE classes. The district wouldn’t have the resources to support five literacy intervention teachers, three literacy coaches and three STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) coaches. There would be no middle school maker-space, no award-winning middle school robotics team, and no middle school athletic director. Sixth graders wouldn’t participate in Outdoor Ed, seventh graders wouldn’t go camping in Yosemite, and eighth graders wouldn’t spend four days in Washington DC.
You also can view REF’s impact purely in terms of personnel, with REF funding 28 out of 246 district positions. Or you can look at REF’s support in purely financial terms: Thanks to REF, each of the approximately 1,550 students who attend schools in the Ravenswood City School District–which covers East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park and includes three elementary schools and one middle school–will receive about $7,000 worth of support during the 2024-2025 school year. (In comparison, Palo Alto Partners in Education (PIE), the non-profit that supports students in the Palo Alto Unified School District, contributed about $500 per student in the 2023-2024 school year.)
The Bay Area supports hundreds of nonprofits whose mission is to provide opportunities for people who haven’t had the good fortune to partake in Silicon Valley’s bounty. Ravenswood families clearly fit that description: about nine out of ten Ravenswood students come from low-income families and a staggering 43 percent are homeless or housing insecure, meaning that, even if students have a home, they are at risk of getting evicted or their living quarters are unsafe.
But the magnitude of REF’s donations, which have more than doubled in the past five years, are in a league of their own given the relatively small population that REF serves. Ever modest, REF’s executive director Jenna Wachtel Pronovost attributes REF’s huge fundraising wins to the non-profit’s location in a community whose residents value education, to donors’ awareness of the ever-increasing disparities in opportunities for kids living on one side of the freeway and those living on the other, and to an exceptional team of district educators who are laser focused on improving students’ school experience.
But several REF Board members give much of the credit for REF’s outsized donations–and the resulting benefits they provide Ravenswood students–to Jenna and her district counterpart, Ravenswood City School District Superintendent Gina Sudaria.
“The goal of improving student experience in Ravenswood is what guides everything Jenna and Gina do. And they do it so well and with such ferocity and yet such grace that donors respond,” says REF Board Member and former REF Executive Director Renu Nanda.
Rewarding teaching excellence
Perhaps the most sweeping outcome of the Ravenswood/REF partnership is the Ravenswood Talent Initiative, a groundbreaking approach to recruiting, retaining, and rewarding excellent teachers and staff. The Initiative was designed by the Ravenswood administration and its teacher’s union the Ravenswood Teachers Association and is made possible only because of funding from REF to the tune of $15.4 million over five years.
When predicting students’ academic success, research shows that the quality of the teacher is the most important school-based factor (as opposed to environmentally-based factors like parents’ income or their education level.) Yet Ravenswood historically has had difficulty attracting and keeping good teachers and staff, in part because of the low salaries Ravenswood paid compared to salaries paid by neighboring districts. Five years ago, for example, Ravenswood teachers’ salaries were 30 percent below neighboring districts and 40 percent of teachers left the district within the first five years of teaching, in part because they could earn more elsewhere.
To begin to level the playing field, the Talent Initiative in its first year gave all teachers a 10 percent raise. The next year, starting salaries were increased by 15 percent.
But what sets the Talent Initiative apart from traditional teacher compensation packages in which teacher pay is based on educational level and years of experience is aptly described by the Talent Initiative tagline: “smarter compensation linked to evaluation.”
Ravenswood teachers are evaluated multiple times a year both formally and informally by their school’s principal or vice-principal (two of the district’s vice-principals are funded by REF.) Following each teacher evaluation, the evaluator provides the teacher with detailed feedback including suggestions for improvement. Teachers have the option of also working with coaches, also funded by REF, who provide additional support and feedback. At the end of the year, teachers receive a rating of from one to five based on their evaluations as well as other factors. As a result, a teacher’s movement up the salary ladder is directly tied to their performance.
Before the Talent Initiative went into effect, the highest salary a Ravenswood teacher could earn was $92,000. Now a teacher who consistently receives 5’s on their evaluations can earn $156,418, which is commensurate with experienced teachers’ salaries in neighboring districts. Teachers are not “graded on a curve” so there is no limit to the number of teachers who can receive the highest rating.
The Talent Initiative is in its fourth year and several indicators suggest that it’s having an impact. In 2023-24, the district retained 80 percent of teachers who’d received a rating of three or higher. In addition, at the start of this school year, a hundred percent of classrooms were taught by credentialed teachers, a nod to increased starting salaries. And for the first time Gina can remember, when classes started in the fall, every position in the district was filled. Administrators from several school districts have reached out to Gina to learn more about the Talent Initiative with the idea that they may want to implement a similar program.
About those test scores…
In the 2023-24 school year, only 8.6 percent of Ravenswood students scored at or above grade level in English language arts; 6.4 percent scored at or above grade level in math.
Several factors contribute to these results. In addition to the district’s high percentage of low income and housing insecure students, 47 percent of students are second language learners. And the district’s transient population makes seeing student growth over time especially challenging. (Last year the student population increased 17 percent from the first day of school to the last.) But rather than minimizing the significance of state-wide test results, Jenna and Gina point to major steps the district is taking, many possible only because of REF support, to improve instruction.
Given the impact of attracting and retaining high quality teachers, the Talent Initiative is a pillar of the district’s strategy for improving student test scores. The district is also counting on its decision to move from a balanced literacy curriculum to a science of reading (phonics-based) curriculum to move the needle.
Another significant change in instruction is the district’s decision to supplement grade level instruction with Universal Tier 2 Instruction Time, affectionately referred to by students as UT2T. What that means is that, for forty minutes a day, four or five days a week, students meet in groups of three to five where they receive intensive, individualized literacy instruction based on their literacy level. Instruction is provided primarily by classroom teachers, reading intervention teachers (five out of seven of whom are funded by REF), City Year corps members, and community volunteers trained by EPA non-profit Ravenswood Classroom Partners. Jenna acknowledges that it’s an extremely resource-intensive approach but, she says, it’s the most effective way the district has found to address individual student needs while also providing students with grade-level instruction.
While it’s still too early to determine these changes’ impact on standardized test results, the district has been conducting incremental benchmark tests that indicate improvement, particularly in the early grades. The district’s short-term literacy goal is for 30 percent of third graders to be reading at or above grade level by the end of the 2028/29 school year and that, Gina insists, is just the starting point of where the district needs to be.
Many districts with low test scores have disbanded all forms of enrichment–think music, art, field trips–in favor of an almost exclusive focus on literacy and math. But, thanks to REF, Ravenswood hasn’t had to do that. As Gina sees it, “REF has let us keep the joy of our school and the culture alive, while also supporting our instructional focus.”
Building trust
One takeaway of Dale Russakoff’s The Prize, a recounting of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s well-intentioned but ill-advised attempt to reform Newark, New Jersey’s public schools, is that school reform based on public/private partnerships can only be successful if there’s mutual trust among all parties involved. It’s taken many years, but trust is now the bedrock of the REF/District partnership.
REF was founded in 2007 as an outgrowth of a Menlo Park Presbyterian Church Compassion Weekend project. In its early years, the district was so resource poor that REF focused primarily on providing teachers with supplies as basic as pencils and paper. In subsequent years, members of REF’s Program Committee would suggest more far-reaching programs to the district, but it always was REF taking the initiative, and district follow-through was spotty.
Despite those challenges, REF remained steadfast in its support. “It was really important to us that we create something that would be sustainable over time, and that we not leave the district in a lurch by taking our funding and moving somewhere else,” explains Brenda Woodson, an original REF board member who currently serves as board treasurer.
When Gina became interim superintendent in August 2019, the relationship between the district and REF began to shift. Today, it’s the district that takes the lead in determining how REF dollars can have the most impact.
“Since the District now has such strong leadership and such a strong team, and we have developed such confidence in them, we now have the district tell us their goals. This year’s goals are literacy, attendance and talent. So we ask, ‘What do you need around literacy? What do you need around attendance? What do you need around talent? How can we help?” REF Board Chair Carolyn Bowsher says. “We trust that the district and the community know what they need and what they want.”
More about Jenna
When Jenna was in second grade, she told her mom she wanted to be a rabbi who is a ballerina who helps people stop smoking. That’s not exactly how things turned out, but some of her early proclivities endured.
Jenna grew up in Atherton and started taking dance classes when she was three. She was on track to become a professional ballerina, but during her sophomore year at Menlo-Atherton High School she decided to cut short her budding ballet career and focus on preparing for college.
Eager to spend time with kids she didn’t normally interact with, Jenna joined M-A’s Ballet Folklorico dance team where, as the only non-Spanish speaker, she witnessed how it feels to be an outsider both culturally and linguistically. “That experience set me up on the journey to expand my worldview even in the community where I grew up,” Jenna says.
After graduating from M-A, Jenna attended Stanford where she majored in English, minored in dance, and was a member of Stanford’s competitive salsa team. Jenna knew that she wanted to work in social justice and chose education as the vehicle to do that, earning her master’s degree in elementary education, also at Stanford. (Jenna’s future husband was the only male in her Master’s program cohort of students studying to be elementary school teachers.)
More About Gina
Gina grew up in Costa Mesa, a mid-sized city in Orange County, and attended Newport Harbor High School where she was one of a handful of Black students. (She was the first Black homecoming queen; a year later, her sister was the second.)
In high school, Gina participated in basketball, weight-lifting, and track where she was ranked third in the state for shot put. The Orange County Register described her as “one of the most decorated athletes ever in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.”
About a decade ahead of Jenna, Gina also attended Stanford where she majored in psychology, minored in African American Studies, and was on Stanford’s varsity track team where she earned a third place finish in the hammer throw at the PAC 10 championship. During her senior year she started volunteering at Stanford’s Barrio Assistance Program where she tutored kids in East Palo Alto and, as she puts it, “fell in love with the community.”
Rooted in Ravenswood
Coincidentally, both Jenna and Gina’s first job out of college was teaching elementary school in the Ravenswood district. (Jenna taught a combined kindergarten and first grade and Gina taught first grade.)
Jenna taught in the district for several years; then spent a few years teaching kindergarten in Palo Alto. “I wanted to work toward a just society and didn’t think teaching in Palo Alto would get me there, but I learned what a well-resourced school looks like. If I hadn’t taught in Palo Alto, I’m not sure I would have been as prepared to do the job I have now,” Jenna says.
Jenna later worked as a consultant at the New Teacher Center; then, in 2019, she returned to Ravenswood as REF’s executive director.
Gina has worked in Ravenswood during her entire 27-year career, not only as a teacher but also as a vice-principal, principal, director of student services, director of human services, interim superintendent, and superintendent.
In a video called Sharing Our Stories, Gina describes her connection to East Palo Alto this way: “When I was a student at Stanford, those many years ago, and I was introduced to East Palo Alto, I knew this was where I wanted to serve, this is where I wanted to be; the community is the one that has given me purpose, who has made me who I am.”
When galas go by the wayside
While there’s no question that REF has influenced the district’s ability to serve its students, the district also has influenced REF in terms of the non-profits’ connection with the Ravenswood community.
Perhaps REF’s most unconventional departure from the usual non-profit playbook was to replace its annual fundraising gala with a giant party that was free and open to the community.
For many years, REF’s gala, held at the Four Seasons hotel in East Palo Alto, was a semi-formal affair with cocktails, dinner, auctions, and a short program about REF. Jenna said that it “just didn’t feel right” so she and the Board decided to change the venue to East Palo Alto’s EPACENTER and also found ways for more Ravenswood teachers, staff, and families to attend. But Jenna still wasn’t happy.
“We got to thinking, ‘Why are we spending all this money and energy and time on this party when maybe we could do something that was more for the community’?” Jenna says.
In 2024, REF replaced its gala with Rock ‘N’ Roar, a blowout of a festival held at the district’s Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School that was attended by more than a thousand students, families, donors, community partners, and educators. Thanks to pre-event sponsorships, Rock ‘N’ Roar raised more money than any of REF’s previous galas. But its impact went beyond that.
“We’ve gone from an exclusive gala to a community-centered festivity where we’re all together for one purpose, which is exactly what the evolution of the REF/Ravenswood partnership has been all about,” Gina says.
Renu, REF’s previous executive director, describes the significance of Rock ‘N’ Roar this way: “We started as outside funders, and now we’re partners walking alongside the district.”
Jenna, Gina, and several REF Board members concur that, in an ideal world, the public sector would provide school districts the support they need to set up every student for success. But given that that’s not happening, the REF/Ravenswood partnership has become an indispensable alternative.
“Thanks to our donors, money is not the obstacle to addressing problems here in Ravenswood. We need to keep the funds coming so that the district can keep innovating and keep implementing. And then we need to give the district time to get the results we’re all been working towards,” Gina concludes.
Postscript
So what happened to the little girl, let’s call her Natalia, whom I mentioned in the beginning of this story and who is now a third grader at Belle Haven. Natalia and her mom recently came to visit, so I took that opportunity to ask Natalia about school.
When I asked her what subject she likes best, she said science. When I asked her what she was studying in science she said vertebrates and invertebrates and, when I asked her what other subjects she likes, she said writing and told me that she was writing stories with two paragraphs. She also volunteered that she likes UT2T time because she is learning about long and short vowels, she likes art because she gets to do projects, and she likes music because she is learning to read notes and play the xylophone. She also told me she likes her teacher because she gives her knowledge.
When we sat down to have a snack and I was telling Natalia’s mom about this article and how impressed I was with the district, particularly Jenna and Gina, Natalia looked up from her plate and said, “I know Gina. She’s the boss of everyone.”
There’s not a doubt in my mind that Natalia is headed for academic success.
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Thank you for providing such a detailed description of the work Jenna and Gina and so many others are doing in Ravenswood. It is difficult and incremental, for sure, but the trajectory is very promising. Their commitment is very inspiring. Tikkun Olam.
Also looking for a link so I can send this article to one of Jenna’s M-A teachers who now lives out of state. Thanks.
Hi, Thanks for your comment. And I agree; Jenna and Gina’s commitment really is inspiring. This link should work: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/one-wild-and-precious-life/2024/12/13/how-a-public-private-partnership-and-two-visionary-leaders-are-transforming-the-once-beleaguered-ravenswood-city-school-district/