On a brisk Thursday morning in December 2023, a group of 22 people boarded a dark gray charter bus idling next to the Ravenswood City School District office in East Palo Alto. They sat side by side—parents, teachers, community leaders, and the district’s superintendent, Gina Sudaria, ’98. After traveling more than 200 miles, the group arrived in Lindsay, Calif., a small agricultural town in the Central Valley. They were there to visit classrooms, talk to parents, and hear from administrators. They were there to see what was possible.
Back home, in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood of Menlo Park, their students were struggling. The Ravenswood school district has some of the lowest test scores in the state, with just 8.6 percent of students reading at or above grade level and 6.1 percent of students testing at or above grade level in math, according to the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress for 2023-24. Ravenswood educates students who face significant challenges outside the classroom: 50 percent are homeless or housing insecure, 56 percent are English learners, and 88 percent are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Lindsay Unified, whose student body shares similar demographics, had equally dismal academic achievement in 2007, but it’s become what some refer to as a “turnaround district,” with score distributions now close to the state’s as a whole, attendance rates as high as the 99th percentile, and graduation rates that have climbed from 67 percent to 98 percent.
Sudaria and her team wanted to know how they’d done it.
“It’s not unusual for scores to be persistently low in high-poverty districts, but it’s not inevitable,” says Deborah Stipek, the former dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. However, when it comes to school reform, “you can’t do it without strong leadership.”
With Sudaria at the helm, a change is underway in Ravenswood. In part inspired by the progress in Lindsay, she and her team have created a new plan for the TK–8 district to improve students’ academic outcomes, including their performance on those state tests. “There are all different ways of charting success; I want to acknowledge that,” says Sudaria. “And we have to ensure our students are literate.”
At the final 2024–25 school board meeting in June, Sudaria and her team presented their student progress metrics, hoping the Ravenswood community would continue to support the big changes that have already been made, as well as those on the horizon. Proficiency scores for third to eighth graders—the grades assessed by the state—had barely budged, but internal monitoring showed that the highly focused efforts of the past 18 months were working, with students across the district beginning to close multi-year gaps in knowledge. “I wish that we could move more quickly,” Sudaria said at the board meeting, with i-Ready reading scores displayed on a large screen to her right, “but we had to lay the groundwork, change mindsets, change practices that we’re accustomed to doing.
“We finally have a clear plan.”
The backstory
Stability has been elusive in Ravenswood for most of the past half century, with district families facing a longstanding pattern of turmoil, especially in the superintendent’s office.
In the ’70s and ’80s, Ravenswood churned through 11 superintendents in 10 years. More recent superintendents have had longer tenures, but those have been marred by dysfunction or conflict. Two were accused of nepotism. In 2018, the mayor of East Palo Alto summed up community sentiment in a public letter, accusing district leadership of fostering “a culture of corruption, intimidation, and cover up.” When a new board took office in 2019, it ousted the superintendent and appointed Sudaria as interim superintendent.
Sudaria, who grew up in Southern California, fell in love with Ravenswood as a Stanford senior volunteering with Barrio Assistance, a student-run tutoring program. She applied for a job as a first-grade teacher in Ravenswood as soon as she graduated, in 1998. She’s been in the district ever since, working as a teacher, vice principal, principal, and director of human resources and student services. She became a Ravenswood parent in 2012, when her son began first grade at Costaño Elementary.
‘We couldn’t have this stance—being able to really trust the district and the vision and the strategic plan that they’re implementing—with different leadership.’
“All those years, fulfilling those roles, I never thought I would pursue the role of the superintendent,” she says. But when the board approached her, “I knew it needed to be done, and I knew I would be able to rely on the support of the community, the expertise of team members.”
Sudaria inherited a seven-figure budget deficit and declining enrollment. In her year as interim superintendent (she was appointed to the permanent post in 2020), she made the difficult decision to close two of the district’s five elementary schools.
She didn’t do it alone.
“I held 29 community meetings,” she says. At those meetings, she invited parents and anyone else interested in Ravenswood’s future to listen as she described the challenges: Student enrollment had declined from 5,085 in 1998 to 2,048 in 2019 (last year it was 1,449), and insufficient funding was spread too thin. Then she asked people to weigh in. She and her team brought chart paper with questions like Does your child walk to school? and What are your current school’s greatest strengths? Attendees were given dot stickers to mark their responses, and the charts were displayed and discussed at the end of the meetings.
“This work moves at the speed of trust,” says Héctor Camacho, MA ’07, executive director of equity, social justice, and inclusion at the San Mateo County Office of Education, which oversees the district. “We needed this collaborative leader who really understood that this wasn’t going to be something that a superintendent alone could do.”
Change agents
One day last year, Sudaria got word that a Ravenswood middle schooler had completed a core academic program at school. “I’m like, ‘What program? That’s fantastic!’ ” But when she found out, her heart sank. It was a foundational literacy program. “That’s kindergarten through second grade material,” she says. The student had been unable to sound out words like cat and dog. Sudaria discovered that of the 50 or so students at Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School who lacked foundational literacy skills, five of them—including the one recent literacy graduate—had spent their entire academic lives in the district.
“As the superintendent, I’m responsible for those five students,” she says. “What we’re doing is not serving all kids, and that’s our job.”
In her early years as superintendent, Sudaria had used what she calls a “cookie-cutter” strategic plan to guide decision-making, full of spreadsheets, templates, and benchmarks. “There wasn’t room for creativity,” she says. “There wasn’t room to make it truly owned by the community and the district.”
As that plan’s timeline drew to a close, Sudaria saw an opportunity. In the summer of 2023, she launched the Ravenswood Promise, a listening tour and collaborative process for creating a new strategic plan. The trip to Lindsay came that winter, and in the months that followed, a plan took shape around what Sudaria calls the three rocks: literacy, teacher talent, and attendance—each foundational to student learning. Fixing these areas, she believes, will enable the district to accomplish its overarching goal: to improve student academic outcomes.
Partnering up
On their trip to Lindsay, Sudaria and her team discovered that the district’s leadership had succeeded by amplifying the voices of parents and working in partnership with teachers and community leaders. Even so, the night the Ravenswood group arrived in Lindsay, they sat down to dinner and listened as district staff explained that the turnaround had required polarizing choices.
“They were quite honest and said, ‘You know what, not everyone wanted to stay on board,’ ” Sudaria says. Ravenswood leaders, she adds, were coming to a similar realization: “Gosh, maybe not all of us are going to be part of this at the end.”
Take Ravenswood’s Teacher Talent Initiative, which began in 2021 with a sit-down between teachers’ union representatives and district office staff. “There was no our side and your side. It was all together,” says Jessica Cox, who taught for 23 years before becoming one of the district’s instructional coaches last year. The group developed a plan that allows teachers to move multiple rungs up the pay ladder each year by participating in an intensive professional review process that involves observations by principals and conversations with instructional coaches. Through efforts that include the Talent Initiative, base pay has risen from $51,823 in 2019-20 to $70,064 for 2024-25, while the maximum salary has increased from $96,818 in 2019-20 to $156,418 in 2024-25, a number now on par with neighboring districts.
TAG TEAM: When Wachtel Pronovost, right, assumed her role as executive director of the Ravenswood Education Foundation six years ago, the nonprofit was raising $3 million to $4 million per year. This past school year, she led an effort that raised $10 million, thanks to donor confidence in Sudaria’s leadership.
But some teachers left the district, perceiving that the initiative was laborious and tied pay to their popularity with administrators. Other staff members saw this turnover as necessary, or at least unavoidable.
“The folks that we’ve lost over the Talent Initiative are teachers that didn’t really fit our culture,” says Alejandro Quezada, ’97, MA ’08, the principal of Los Robles-Ronald McNair Academy. “They would not have been able to thrive in this kind of environment, where you’re being asked to really be creative and innovate.” That means not just following a curriculum’s structure but also bringing it to life in original ways—as his third-grade teaching team did by designing a science unit in the school garden that involved hands-on work, observation, and journaling. Last year, Ravenswood appeared to have gotten past the spike in turnover, retaining 80 percent of its high-performing teachers.
The Talent Initiative is possible because of a powerhouse nonprofit that fundraises nearly 20 percent of the district’s budget. The Ravenswood Education Foundation (REF) funded the initiative with $3 million per year for five years, enough to cover 10 percent of all 106 teacher salaries. All told, the foundation fully supports 34 teacher salaries.
In exchange for transparency and good communication, the foundation gives Sudaria a wide berth to put its money to work. “We couldn’t have this stance—being able to really trust the district and the vision and the strategic plan that they’re implementing—with different leadership,” says Jenna Wachtel Pronovost, ’06, MA ’07, the executive director of REF and a former Ravenswood teacher. A key part of Sudaria’s leadership style, Wachtel Pronovost says, is her focus on partnership. “I see it because I’m down the hall,” she says. “People just show up, like, ‘Do you have a minute?’ And Gina always does make time for them, because she knows that that is the critical part of having buy-in.” When Wachtel Pronovost assumed her role six years ago, REF was raising $3 million to $4 million per year. This past school year, she led an effort that raised $10 million.
The attendance and literacy rocks are also reliant on REF. About 41 percent of Ravenswood students were chronically absent in 2023-24, roughly double the state average. Sudaria taps REF funds to underwrite offerings that make kids excited to go to school—for example, annual field trips for middle schoolers to Washington, D.C., Yosemite National Park, and the Bay Area redwoods. The district has also put art and music teachers in every school, and it offers special classes and clubs, such as robotics. (In 2024-25, chronic absenteeism dropped to 34 percent, in keeping with a statewide trend.) The literacy programs aimed at increasing that 8.6 percent proficiency rate include the ambitious Universal Tier 2 Time (or UT2T): individualized reading intervention for all 1,449 students every day of the week with the help of teachers, reading specialists, and hundreds of carefully coordinated volunteers.
With the three rocks in place, Sudaria says Ravenswood is on track to see 30 percent of third through eighth graders scoring proficient on state reading tests three years from now and 70 percent proficient 10 years from now. Though some community members are critical of that timeframe, others feel hopeful based on the interim results. “I’m very proud of where we are,” said board vice president Samuel Tavera at the June school board meeting. “This isn’t the Ravenswood of the past, and even of last week.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
