After turmoil at Pajaro Valley Unified School District, its superintendent charts a path forward

When Heather Contreras took the helm of the county’s largest school district last May, she inherited a system in turmoil.

In less than a year, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District superintendent has faced a backlash over proposed layoffs, the resignation of the district’s second chief financial officer in three years after trustees refused to fully implement recommended staff reductions, and accusations by parents and teachers that officials had improperly removed a beloved high school principal.

Contreras is PVUSD’s third superintendent in three years, following Michelle Rodriguez’s resignation in 2023 and a year under interim leader Murry Scheckman. She inherited a contentious dispute over a contract with an ethnic studies consultant that helped spark a major shakeup on the board of trustees. By spring, more than 350 people had signed a petition calling for a vote of no confidence in Contreras’ leadership.

Yet despite the tumult, Contreras is confident that the district has made progress on important issues since she started on the job last May 1. “The district is definitely…in a better place than we were a year ago,” she said in a recent interview, while acknowledging “we have definitely hard things coming.”

Contreras declined to comment on some of the challenges she has faced, such as the recent fallout from Aptos High School Principal Alison Hanks-Sloan’s unexpected announcement that she wouldn’t return to the school next year. District officials claim Hanks-Sloan resigned, but her father publicly disputed that account, saying the district had reassigned his daughter to a new role that has yet to be determined. Parents and teachers rallied behind Hanks-Sloan, believing she was removed for advocating to maintain the school’s seven-period schedule. 

Contreras declined to comment, citing confidentiality. “That one is a personnel issue,” she said. “We’re never going to be able to talk about that.” 

The superintendent told Lookout in a wide-ranging conversation that she has been focused on leading PVUSD through its significant challenges with declining enrollment, budget deficits, infrastructure needs that top $1 billion and struggling student achievement. 

She pointed to headway the district has already made in those areas, which will also be among her main priorities for her second year on the job, she said. 

Contreras has overseen initiatives to increase attendance in the district, which has climbed by 2% to 92.9% since last year. She has also guided PVUSD as it organized a successful campaign to get a $315 million bond measure approved in November to improve facilities at its schools and helped establish a community task force that researched budget solutions and made recommendations to the school board for budget cuts. 

The ongoing budget deficit is among the most pressing issues facing the district, which is responsible for educating 15,000-students and another 1,000 at its six charter schools. Enrollment has dropped 16% since 2017 and the district expects to lose about another 600 students next year. It also faces an uncertain future when it comes to federal funding.

Earlier this year, trustees approved layoffs of 60.55 full-time equivalent positions compared to the 100 full-time positions district officials had recommended in order to trim the budget by $5 million this school year. Due to a number of resignations and retirements, the district passed out layoff notices to just a portion of the total 60.55, including 30 teachers.

PVUSD is still deficit spending and will have to make even steeper cuts next year. Contreras said the district still has to adjust its spending to match declining enrollment and the loss of pandemic-era federal funds. 

District officials had recommended that the board cut $5 million in total payroll expenses to stay fiscally solvent, but fell short of that goal. Contreras said the district still needs to make up for that shortfall, while also needing to cut an additional $5 million from its budget in each of the next two school years.  

“So next year, the recommendations are going to be a little steeper than what we anticipated because we didn’t make the decisions that we thought we would make this year,” she said. “It just makes next year a little tougher.”

Similar to this past year, she said the district will convene a sustainable budget team made up of community members to review the budget and make recommendations for reductions to the governing board. She said the team, who has yet to be selected, could start meeting within the next month or two. 

Im, the outgoing chief business officer, will help Contreras lead the sustainable budget team meetings on a voluntary basis as she’ll be staying in the area. 

Contreras said she’s also tackling student attendance and test scores that have yet to fully bounce back from the remote learning of the pandemic era, and working to improve the district’s high school graduation rate, which stood at 90.6% last year.

In 2024, the PVUSD students scored 101.2 points below the standard in math. The scoring system measures whether students have the knowledge and skills to be on track for college and career readiness. 

To help improve math scores among transitional kindergarten through 8th grade, last year the district hired Swun Math, an organization that helps teachers develop math lessons to better engage students. Contreras said three schools volunteered to be part of the pilot program this year and she has plans to expand that to eight additional schools next year. “They’ve heard about it now and seen the success, and they want to have that for themselves as well.”

To improve graduation rates, the district created teams of school staff that review student grades to see where they’re failing in order to intervene early and ensure they graduate. Called “graduation rate intervention teams,” the staff meet quarterly with each of the three high schools to look at data, like the rate of D and F grades. Based on the data, they ask what supports the students and schools need to help them be more successful. 

“Each school is different, and so every time we’re meeting, we’re coming up with new ideas and new strategies,” she said. 

The district has also been preparing to start using funds from the $315 million bond measure voters approved in November.

Contreras said one of the first projects to break ground will be a park at Rio Del Mar Elementary. The “Blue Park,” as the Rio Del mar community calls it, is small but was used heavily by the families in the area, Contreras said. 

Last summer, the playground was deemed unsafe and the swings removed, according to a website established by parents trying to restore the park. “Instead of kids playing after school, families head straight home, and the school’s sense of community is suffering,” parents wrote. 

Contreras said improvements at other school playgrounds and fresh coats of paint on school buildings will be starting throughout the summer. Bond money will also start to go toward replacing and renovating HVAC systems in schools and replacing screens that teachers use in classrooms for instruction. 

Among the larger projects is a new performing arts center for Pajaro Valley High School, which will break ground sometime next year. In the meantime, the school will get a $200,000 mobile stage – which Contreras likened to “a Taylor Swift stage” – to give students a performance space.

“We’ve heard so much from our students at PV High School about their feelings of not having all the things that the other high schools have,” Contreras said.

The district is also working on adding culinary arts courses and an athletic physical education period at Pajaro Valley High. That period would be at the end of the day so that all the sports teams have their physical education as part of their school day rather than having practice end later in the day. 

While Aptos High will have a seven-period schedule at least through the next academic year, Contreras said that the schedule for Pajaro Valley High School – whose staff has voted for a seven period – is “still in discussion” among school staff and labor partners.

To further address students’ concerns about the difference in course offerings among the district’s three high schools, Contreras said administrators have hired a company called Aspiring Hire to see how to reduce disparities among the schools. The review is to “help ensure that there’s equity among them, and not necessarily that each high school is the same, but that each high school is equal,” she said. 

Despite all of the varied challenges she’s faced, Contreras said probably the hardest part of the past year since starting the new job was having to quickly get to know the history and the people in order to best lead the district. “Making sure that I was connecting with people, that was probably some of the biggest challenges,” she said. “And making sure that I was connecting in the right way, and getting the right information, and committing all of those things to memory so that as a team, we would be able to make the right decisions for the district.”