By Kathleen Acuff
 TED SIMON/TOWN CRIER A girl holds a sign of peace at Sunday’s groundbreaking of a new sanctuary for the Antiochian church in Los Altos Hills. |
Marge Gratiot will retire as head of the Los Altos School District at the end of the next school year, she announced Monday night. She will have worked as an educator for 37 years by then - all but two of those years in this district.
The superintendent said her letter requesting the board of trustees’ permission to retire was “the hardest letter I have ever had to write.”
Her letter said, in part, “It has been a dream job - not always easy, but always challenging and fulfilling. How fortunate I have been to have a job that is also a passion, and to have the opportunity to be part of a team that has created a district that is so successful.”
Selecting a new superintendent will probably take most of the next school year, and Gratiot will not choose her successor.
“I imagine the board will consider both inside and outside candidates and then choose the best person,” she said. “I would recommend that they use a search firm and work with it and the community to identify the characteristics they want in the new superintendent, then recruit applicants. Sometimes the pool of applicants for jobs in this area is fairly small, largely because of the cost of housing, but I think this is an attractive district with an excellent reputation, so we should attract some viable candidates.”
The immediate challenge facing the next superintendent will be learning how things are done locally, she said.
“If the new superintendent comes from another district, it will take a while to adapt to the culture of this district, which is fairly unique and also not readily apparent,” Gratiot said.
Current challenges
The superintendent identified three major challenges for the district in the next year: managing the change when its funding mechanism goes from revenue limit to basic aid; finding a way to keep its academic program intact despite budget cuts this year and next; and finding and training people to take on the responsibilities of the administrators and teachers who will be retiring in the next few years. These experienced teachers are “the backbone of our programs,” Gratiot said.
In the coming school year, she plans to work with employee organizations to develop a formula that ties total compensation to changes in revenue; provide health-care benefits to employees “in a way that does not gobble up all their salary money”; implement different ways of providing special education services, perhaps by district staff “rather than expensive outside consultants”; and provide opportunities for future principals to develop the skills they will need as administrators.
Facing the district now are uncertainty about the way the charter school situation will evolve, the need to reduce expenses and threats of litigation from more than one quarter.
To manage the budget crisis, the district is looking at reducing staff to save about $1 million, but it probably will not cut support staff, the superintendent said. Most of the 110 support positions eliminated in 2002 have not been restored, and “further cuts could jeopardize student health and safety.”
Gratiot said no teachers will be laid off, but the district will defer hiring replacements for those who retire or leave for other reasons.
“We always tighten around the edges,” she said. “We are going to have to look at several other areas: class size, enrichment programs, hiring practices, increasing rental income, health and welfare benefits. Long term, we are going to have to do a better job of keeping cost increases in line with revenue increases.”
Asked about the threats of litigation that came at the district this year, Gratiot said, “The district has to make the best decisions it can without being frightened by threats of litigation. We follow the law very carefully and conscientiously, and we ask for and follow the recommendations of our attorneys. Our strategy has been to make sure we are in an advantageous position if there is litigation, not to avoid it at any cost. We cannot stop people who initiate frivolous or malicious litigation - but I would hope they would look at who is really being hurt, and it’s the students.”
High points
Among the high points of Gratiot’s tenure are the passage in 1989 of Measure A, Santa Clara County’s first parcel tax, with strong community support, and the passage in 1998 of Measure H, the $94.7 million bond measure, with 75.4 percent of the vote, and the subsequent renovation of all campuses. In 1994 the Associated Press named the district No. 1 in the state. In 1995-96 Gratiot was named California’s Superintendent of the Year. She was chosen Los Altan of the Year in 1998.
She is particularly proud that LASD is the only district in the county to have fully implemented the class-size reduction policy - and managed it in only two months the first year of the law’s enactment. Then there is the solid success of the schools, the top performers in the state for the past five years.
Gratiot became superintendent in 1987 after Dick Scardamaglia left to take on the superintendency of a Marin County district.
