Last Thursday was the first day of school for the Healdsburg Unified School District. After two and a half months of hibernation, campus hallways and schoolyards once again exploded with life. And at Healdsburg High School on Prince Avenue, where art teacher Linus Lancaster greeted fellow staff and students with his signature bagpipe performance in a kilt, a fresh but familiar face showed up for his first day as principal: 44-year-old Tait Danhausen, HHS Class of 1998.
“We are very excited to welcome Tait Danhausen back to HUSD,” Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel told the Tribune last week. “He grew up here, graduated from HHS and … wanted to give back to the community that invested in him.”
The high school’s new principal is a fifth-generation Sonoma County native—and third- or fourth-generation Healdsburg native—who’s been overseeing a charter-school system in Tennessee called LEAD Public Schools for the past decade and a half. He now returns home to fill what has become something of a musical principal’s chair at HHS, which has churned through three different principals over the past four years.
District officials hope this time will be the charm. The outgoing principal, Francisco Manriquez, only stayed for one year, stepping down due to “personal reasons,” according to Superintendent Vanden Heuvel. His predecessor, Amy Jones-Kerr, departed after two years to take a promotion as superintendent of the Rincon Valley School District in Santa Rosa. Before that, Bill Halliday served four years as HHS principal after a long stint at the junior high.
It Ends Here
Danhausen believes the trend will stop with him. Speaking to the Tribune from his new office on the teacher workday before the first day of school, his sleeves rolled up and his brow glistening from hours of back-to-back meetings, he said that returning to his hometown of Healdsburg, now with a wife and kids in tow, was “always the goal.”
He added: “Turnover is hard, right? You want someone who is going to be here long-term. That’s the plan.”
Danhausen comes from a long line of local educators. Two of his grandparents taught within Healdsburg’s public school system for decades, and his mom taught at the Mark West Union School District just south of town.
“I was at the district kickoff and three people in the transportation department came up to me and said, ‘I had your grandpa as a teacher at the junior high,’” Danhausen said. “And then I was talking to Kim Thompson, the head of the Boosters, and I didn’t know this, but he’s related to my grandpa. He’s a second cousin. Like, we are literally related.”
Greyhound Alumni
Danhausen joins a new wave of fired-up HHS alumni returning home to pour their skills back into the school that raised them—including new football coach Criss Rosales, Class of 2013, and recently hired math teacher Matthew Lopez, Class of 2017.
Lopez said he loves that the school’s new principal is another alum. “I find it wonderful that we have such a wide range of alumni at HHS who are teaching the next generation of Healdsburg students,” he said. “In my interactions so far, Tait has been an approachable listener; it’s nice.”
Football coach Rosales, too, said he was heartened to see the new principal “asking questions regarding logistics, goals and how we can improve in certain coaches-to-admin processes.”
Superintendent Vanden Heuvel said of hiring Danhausen: “While he’s been out of the community for a while, his historical knowledge and dedication to the students and parents of Healdsburg elevated him above the rest of our applicants. I am confident that Mr. Danhausen will provide dynamic and consistent leadership for our high school for many years to come.”
Danhausen’s education and career have taken him from San Diego to New York City to the Bay Area to Nashville, where—according to Healdsburg’s superintendent of schools—he was “able to transform two middle schools from being identified by the state as low performing to high performing.” The superintendent said he heard from some of Danhausen’s former colleagues that he was “one of the strongest, most dynamic principals they had worked with.”
He also served for many years as an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher and administrator at schools with large Latino populations, like HHS.
Danhausen said he’s excited to bring everything he’s learned back to Healdsburg. “We can really use those lessons from there—the way we communicated with families and built community and built trust,” he said. “If that’s something we need to do here, we’re ready for it.”
