New PVUSD superintendent will ‘listen and learn’ before deciding on ethnic studies contract controversy

Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s incoming superintendent says she plans to do her due diligence on whether the district should reconsider a controversial decision not to renew its contract with a consultant who helped guide the creation of its ethnic studies curriculum. 

Heather Contreras, who starts officially with the district May 1, told Lookout that before making any decision on the ethnic studies contract, she’ll work with the community and the district board of trustees to figure out next steps. 

“Not having been in the district yet during the ethnic studies program adoption and other decisions, I think my first approach will be to look, listen and learn,” she said, “which is how I see my first few months playing out.” 

Contreras attended a March 27 meeting where dozens of teachers, students and parents continued a monthslong campaign to convince trustees to reverse their decision to not renew a contract with Community Responsive Education (CRE). The consulting firm is run by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University. 

The district has contracted with CRE for its ethnic studies support since 2021, when California passed legislation mandating that all public high schools offer ethnic studies courses by 2025. By 2030, California students will be required to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate high school.  

CRE didn’t create a curriculum or lesson plans, but helped the district develop its own framework, which teachers use as a guide for creating their own curriculum. The district’s three high schools have three different kinds of ethnic studies courses: history, art and English. 

Last September, however, the board voted not to renew CRE’s contract over what trustees Georgia Acosta and Kim De Serpa said were concerns about Tintiangco-Cubales’ involvement with a 2019 version of a model curriculum that ethnic studies experts had drafted on behalf of the state. 

Multiple groups, including Hindus, Arabs and Armenians, asked for revisions to the draft. The state scrapped parts of the curriculum after some Jewish groups, including the Jewish Legislative Caucus, said the draft omitted “any meaningful discussion of antisemitism” and disagreed with its characterization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

The state eventually approved a revised model curriculum that largely removed references to Israel and Palestine while adding lessons on Jewish Americans, among other groups.

That prompted all the draft writers, including prominent ethnic studies scholars such as Tintiangco-Cubales, to urge the state to remove their names from the document. They said the new curriculum no longer reflected the work of ethnic studies professionals after it was altered because of “political and media pressure.” 

De Serpa and Acosta pointed to the controversy over the draft statewide curriculum as a reason not to renew Tintiangco-Cubales’ contract.

“[CRE has] already been in our district teaching for two years with a pedagogy that I don’t know what they’re teaching,” De Serpa told the September meeting. “It makes me very uncomfortable as a Jewish woman. I am shocked actually.”

Since then, students, community members and more than a dozen teachers have denounced the concerns against Tintiangco-Cubales and have been pressuring PVUSD trustees to bring back CRE. More than 1,700 people have signed a petition calling for the district to issue an apology to Tintiangco-Cubales. Dozens showed up to the board’s March 27 meeting to urge the board to renew CRE’s contract. Students held signs and read statements about the impact of the ethnic studies courses. 

Acosta, the board president, told the crowd that the decision whether or not to renew the contract would be made in consultation with Contreras when she starts on the job. 

“We have heard you and we’ve heard your concerns around our district’s ethnic studies curriculum,” she said. “One of the first things this governing board of directors will be addressing as a top priority with our new superintendent in this new year … is the district’s ethnic studies curriculum.” 

De Serpa – who is running for District 2 Santa Cruz County supervisor – told Lookout she wouldn’t comment or answer additional questions about the curriculum or whether she still opposes renewing the contract with CRE. “We have an excellent ethnic studies curriculum in place,” she said. “We were one of the first in the state, and I’m very proud of that effort.” 

Tintiangco-Cubales told Lookout that she is inspired to see students, families and teachers working together on the effort to renew her contract. She has previously described the allegations of antisemitism against her as unfounded and “an act of defamation” in a letter to the district board last October.

“People have really stood up and said there’s an injustice here,” she told Lookout in an interview last week. “Part of that injustice is not renewing the CRE contract and allegations against me, but I think even more, they’re standing up for themselves because they want to be heard and they do not see that the school board and district is really hearing them.” 

District officials say if CRE’s contract isn’t renewed, students will continue to receive the same ethnic studies courses as they have this past year. The third and final year of CRE’s work with the district would have trained administrators on the district’s ethnic studies framework. 

PVUSD partnered with CRE for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years and provided teachers the guidance and training to build their ethnic studies curriculum.

For example, last summer, CRE staff helped the district create the curriculum framework, known as F.I.E.L.D.S, in honor of the experiences of Pajaro Valley’s farming community. F.I.E.L.D.S stands for freedom, identity, empathy, literacy, dreams and solidarity. 

The focus includes centering the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of color in “imagining a world rid of racism and intersectional forms of oppression” and to “show solidarity to support the actualization of all people in Pajaro Valley and beyond.” 

PVUSD Interim Superintendent Murry Schekman said the teachers he’s worked with “love” the CRE training they’ve received. 

“I think how the district created these very meaningful themes for the existing curriculum was genius,” he said. 

Schekman, who is Jewish, said he hasn’t found anything about the ethnic studies curriculum to be antisemitic. He said the district will keep teaching ethnic studies under the current framework that CRE helped develop regardless of whether the district ultimately renews the contract.

“I did my homework,” he said. “I found no evidence of any antisemitism.” 

Watsonville High School seniors Emilia Hernandez, Aiyeanna Villegas Carlos and Sergio Medina-Ixta say the courses have helped them understand the impacts of racism and have also taught them about their backgrounds. All three have parents and relatives from Mexico.

“My ethnic studies course has provided me with an outlook on how systems of oppression personally affect me as a woman of color and how it can affect others,” said Hernandez. 

Villegas Carlos said the courses have been “eye-opening” because they tell stories that traditional history classes tend to miss. 

“We did have a lesson on the history behind Thanksgiving and Native Americans and what really did happen,” she said. “It’s lessons like those that have an impact on us that show us that, hey, there’s two sides of the story, you can form your own opinion and here’s how to identify biased reports.’”

Medina-Ixta said he and other students are disappointed about the board’s decision to not renew the contract because they’ve thrived in the ethnic studies courses. 

“It’s saddening,” he said. “We’re going to keep trying to show them the teachers need the support [from CRE]. It’s like a cause and effect – if the teachers aren’t supported, the students are going to be less supported.”

English ethnic studies teacher Bobby Pelz, who teaches at Watsonville High School, has been to every board meeting since the trustees decided Sept. 13 not to renew the CRE contract. He said he was disappointed in the board’s announcement March 27 to wait for the new superintendent before moving forward with any decision. 

“I just feel like it’s kicking the can down the road to say, ‘Well, we’re not gonna deal with this. And we’re just gonna have somebody else deal with it,’” said Pelz. 

Pelz started teaching at Watsonville High School in 2018. He said over the past six months, he feels some trustees have shown they don’t support ethnic studies in its true form, but instead a “watered-down version.” 

“What we’re teaching our kids is to be proud of who they are, embrace the power they have and to use it,” he said. “It’s about structure, and how things are set up and how they’ve been set up for a long, long time.” 

He added that he feels the high engagement of PVUSD’s high school students at the board meetings, demanding the reversal of the CRE contract’s nonrenewal, is an example of the impact of the course. Pelz said an important aspect of ethnic studies is studying power structures and how they affect people of color – the majority of his students are students of color.

“What the class does, which is so powerful, is that it helps kids understand our power structures, so that they can try to start breaking them down and create more opportunities for themselves,” he said. “And I think this is a great example of that, where so many kids have started coming to speak at board meetings on this issue because they’re engaged.” 

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