'Responsibility Just Oozes Out'

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Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of Eugene Public School District 4J in western Oregon, is not about to get caught up in the “pobrecito syndrome.” That’s the term he uses for the “feel-sorry-for-him-or-her” syndrome.

“You need to have high expectations for all kids,” he says. “You need to love them to death, but we need to have a high bar.”

Balderas, 52, knows something about overcoming childhood challenges. The son of migrant workers who traveled from Mexico to follow crop harvests up and down the West Coast is the 2020 National Superintendent of the Year.

He was born in Mount Vernon, Ore. His family settled in the small town of Nyssa, Ore., on the Idaho border. He lived there with his parents, younger brother and a few extended family members in a migrant labor camp that once had served as a Japanese internment facility. The family shared a room, using a hot plate for cooking, before finding a small house of their own nearby.

As a young teenager, Balderas joined the summer work crews, waking up at 4 a.m. to weed onion and beet fields until 2 p.m.

“I remember my mom saying in Spanish to me that that’s why you get an education, so you don’t have to do the work that we have to do," he said.

He entered school speaking only Spanish, and he spoke with a severe stutter. But he persevered and enrolled at a nearby community college, then jumped at a scholarship to Western Oregon University for bilingual students.

“That’s how I got into teaching,” he says. “That was a route out.”

He found a job as a middle school ESL teacher in the Hillsboro School District, launching a 19-year stretch in the northwestern Oregon district, rising to assistant superintendent before moving on to the first of his three superintendencies since 2011.

The superintendent in Hillsboro, Mike Scott, says Balderas had a major influence there. “At the heart of everything he does is just a deep commitment to make a difference,” Scott says. “That deep sense of responsibility just oozes out of him.

“I know firsthand the importance of students having teachers and staff members who look like them.”

In the 17,500-student Eugene district, which he has led since 2015, one of Balderas’ signal achievements was establishing a standard schedule and calendar for all 31 schools. Previously, students could receive as much as seven months more or less total learning time in their K-12 education depending on which schools they attended.

School board chair Anne Marie Levis says Balderas weathered pushback to the schedule changes from some staffers, unions and others. “He kept listening and talking about the data and what that meant for student achievement,” she says.

Levis credits him for working tirelessly to pass a $319 million capital improvement bond measure — the largest bond in the district’s history.

Balderas says his top current concern is to provide more services to address the trauma many children from marginalized communities feel.

The superintendent co-founded the Oregon Association of Latino Administrators and is working to diversify his district’s work-force, where half the students qualify for free lunch and nearly a third are students of color. Thirty-nine percent of the district’s principals are now people of color, but just 15 percent of teachers are.

“The goal is to try to keep the local talent here,” says Balderas. “I know firsthand the importance of students having teachers and staff members who look like them.”