New principal is all about “we”
Michael DeFrancesco has been working his whole career to get back to a small town, and he says he’s thrilled that it’s going to be Healdsburg. The new principal at Healdsburg Junior High spent some of his classroom teaching years in Boonville and it helped him set long-term career goals.
“I think, there is some transferable knowledge of what it means to be an educator in a small town and what it means to have a school in a small town; how important it can be in a community, not just the students but the staff, the community members, but really as a fabric of the community,” he said. “I learned to enjoy it there and throughout my entire career I’ve intended to find my way to a smaller school district as opposed to large district.”
DeFrancesco met his wife, Heidi Mize, while teaching in Boonville, where she was an aide for an autistic student. The couple then moved to San Francisco where Mize got her psychology degree. They bounced around the Bay Area, with DeFrancesco spending time as a social studies teacher for the community school run by the Marin County Office Of Education, which was for 7-12 graders who had been removed from their home districts.
“It was the toughest of the tough kids in Marin County and that was a very impactful experience for me in terms of learning to work with kids. I learned a lot about how to be a good teacher there — making learning relevant, making good relationships with kids, being a role model, being a steady person in their lives. And, it was a small school environment, which I really enjoyed.”
He was hired as assistant principal for a junior high in Antioch, and then was assistant principal in Martinez at Alhambra High School before moving to the principal role at the junior high there. By then the family had welcomed Jack (now 4) and Lily (soon to be 2), and they started to talk seriously about where and how they wanted to raise their kids.
Mize and DeFrancesco wanted to move closer to family in Anderson Valley and Ukiah, so their children could be closer to their grandparents. They also wanted a different environment that the East Bay suburbs. So when the position in Healdsburg opened up, he jumped at the opportunity. “The move was really generated by trying to get our family closer together, so I took this job and as soon as I got the job that triggered everything else,” he said. “(My wife) just got a job as a school psychologist in Rincon Valley, and then we sold our home and now we’re renting and trying to figure out where were going to be.”
DeFrancesco’s says his management style is collaborative, and he sees his goals for his first year in simple terms. “My approach coming into a school as an administrator is primarily to listen and learn,” he said. “That is the job of year one — to listen and learn. What you are listening for is what are the school’s strengths that you want to continue, that you want to build on, and what are your areas for growth, that everyone knows are just not working and haven’t been working and that builds the work for the next years.”
DeFrancesco also says he plans on working hard on building trust and relationships, by not implementing radical changes or top-down style management. “I’m not going to come in and say, ‘Listen, this is how I run a school and I’ve got some great ideas and this is how I do it and here you go, follow me.’ I’m not really a follow me kind of guy. Were going to go super slow, were going to have deference, were going to honor the traditions, the history.”
It’s clear when speaking to him that DeFrancesco has a lot of affection for students, especially at the middle school level and he speaks passionately about the social and emotional needs of the age group, and how the current culture at HJH has done a good job in meeting them.
“One thing that I’ve gleaned so far is one of (HJH’s) strengths has to do with its culture. If you read the Healthy Kids survey closely you find what appears to be a place where students feel like there are adults who care about them, where students feel safe and where students feel like they are a part of a school and how it functions.
“It doesn’t hurt to reaffirm that the purpose of school is to create a safe learning environment for kids emotionally and also physically,” he continued. “I think middle school, more so than high school and elementary school, is a place where students do need a lot of support around social emotional wellbeing and emotional regulation. How do you work with people who are different than you or have different ideas than you? I think when it comes to emotional safety and school culture it does require much more than any other level.”
DeFrancesco is also keenly aware that a school’s purpose is to instruct, and he wants to change the conversation about that also. He’s a staunch advocate for the new education model of student-centered and inquiry-based learning, and thinks it leads to greater skills and mastery, but he acknowledges that this needs to be communicated to parents and families more clearly.
“If it works, this is a much more effective way to teach kids,” he said. “We should feel good about what were doing instructionally with that paradigm and I think we need to be very interested in talking to parents about that and making sure they understand what we’re doing instructionally. I’m not sure they understand that this shift has taken place in our schools and that it’s a good thing for kids. This is a very well thought out instructional plan that gives students skills and that transition from teaching knowledge to teaching skills is a big deal.”
To wit, he is planning on increasing HJH’s social media presence with a focus on instruction and class work performed by students. “I thinks it’s important to celebrate the work we do in our schools, the rhetoric around education in public schools is disheartening; I think its incumbent on public schools to tell the success of their kids and the amazing work their teachers and kids are doing.”
The new HJH Twitter account is up and running and he encourages everyone in the community to join.
