Letter to the Editor: Superintendent Felix Has Helped District Thrive

By Dawn Ovrom and Bruce Shepherd

Dr. Jeffrey Felix has made several material contributions to the Coronado Unified School District during his tenure as Superintendent.

The biggest impact Dr. Felix has on our schools is his open and inclusive style of leadership. He encourages and, in fact, requires thoughtful and creative approaches to every area of service in our district.

Jeff surrounds himself with passionate people who are dedicated to creating and maintaining the very best education for our students. He appreciates tradition and is tenacious when it comes to supporting our kids.

Here are four ways in which Dr. Felix has contributed to the district:

– For one, he has slowly changed the nature of the dialogue among stakeholders (parents, administration, teachers, non-certificated employees) to a more collegial and productive dialogue – we are not perfect by any means, but we are better able to discuss difficult issues, and to make progress on those issues. 

A great example is the recent tentative agreement reached between the adminsitrative negotiating team and the teachers union (the board voted on that tentative agreement Thursday). 

In negotiating that agreement, both sides discussed maturely and productively their objectives, and both sides made concessions as appropriate to enable the greater overall interests of the children served by the district. Union President Laura Noonan (who also deserves high praise!) was effusive in her praise for the two negotiating teams. 

They reached a compromise that works for all, and that also promotes the infusion of a more disciplined teacher evaluation system into our district. Hardly any other districts in the state have infused such an evaluatory system, and among those that have, most have achieved that result through combative litigation and other adversarial proceedings, rather than through a collaborative negotiation that reaches a mutually approved system.

We did it in Coronado, and I think our success is due in large part to the improved culture that we have achieved under Dr. Felix's leadership!

The conduct and result of recent negotiations is a monumental success. I'm not sure that the community fully understands what this agreement says about our district. A joint statement, and the collaboration it represents, is virtually unheard of in education. That this tremendous accomplishment was posted to our website and sent directly from the superintendent's office to every known address in our data banks, is unprecedented.  

– Another contribution that Dr. Felix has made to Coronado is his expertise in assessment and improvement of our technology systems. Technology is here to stay as a critical part of education, and yet our technology infrastructure was stuck in nuetral, at best, before Dr. Felix arrived.

Dr. Felix assessed the status and promptly developed a plan for re-building our infrastructure and enabling much greater use of technology in the future. Like any major program, there have been some bumps along the road, but we now are in a much better place than just a few years ago. For example, the improvements will enable a much improved communication tool between the district and parents next year, as well as bringing much more sophisticated technological advancements into our curriculum. 

But Dr. Felix is about more than the “gee whiz” factor in technology – he also charges teachers to think about how to productively use these enhancements, and he has organized meaningful professional development, so our new tools do not go under-used. One offshoot of these efforts has been aggressive intervention programs to assist the many students from military families that flow through our district (40 percent of our kids), and we have seen dramatic improvement in the test scores for these students. Another offshoot has been the exploration of an online focused charter school, which may better stimulate the learning styles of many of our kids.

In sum, in five years our use of technology has become both more effective and pervasive – from promoting project based learning, to exploring student-focused learning, to adopting formative “real-time” student assessments that enable student-focused curricular adjustments, to enhancing parent-teacher communication. We have come a long way!

– Third, Dr. Felix has kept a watchful and prudent eye on our finances. He saw the financial clouds coming a few years back, and he encouraged us to adopt a forward thinking 5-year fiscal plan. This was not easy. Our plan candidly forecast many of the fiscal challenges of the last four years, and it forced hard decisions, in many cases earlier than these decisions were faced in neighboring districts. As a consequence, however, we started a healthy dialogue on these issues and our priorities, and that in turn has helped us minimize the adverse impacts upon student programs, notwithstanding the state’s fiscal calamities.

– Fourth, Dr. Felix brought  “Character Counts” to Coronado. This program infuses character education into our schools. And more than that, it encourages everyont to think about the modeling of high character.  As a consequence, this has become a part of our culture; teachers and administrators now infuse character systematically into their programs and lessons. With Dr, Felix’s advocacy, our city too now has adopted “Character Counts,” and our community and parents are pleased. Note also that suspension and expulsion hearings in our district have dropped dramatically since the adoption of these programs, and we have enjoyed three board member election seasons of respectful and thoughtful dialogue.  

Here's an example to illustrate Dr. Felix's approach to his job – Dr. Felix’s persistent (and perhaps favorite) admonition to the board that “Johnny only goes through second grade once.”  

What he means by that is that as leaders in our district, we have to stay focused on the immediacy of our decisions; it does not do much good to a kid currently within a grade or a program if improvements to that program do not come for years to come. 

So yes, we want to keep guiding our schools to greater long-term improvement, but Dr. Felix’s little saying keeps a healthy focus on the present. And I think that infuses a healthy sense of the present realities into our thinking.

We are proud and privileged to work with Dr. Felix. 

Dawn Ovrom is the current president of the Coronado Unified School District board and Bruce Shepherd is the immediate past president.