Laura Hoban, Co-President of the Valley of the Moon Teachers Association, made the following statement on behalf of the union membership to the Board of Trustees at their regular meeting June 5. The union, VMTA, comprises about 98 percent of the District teachers.
On behalf of the Valley of the Moon Teachers Association, we want to begin by thanking our students and families for their partnership through the 2024–2025 school year. It’s been a long, emotional journey—and it’s fair to say that we are all exhausted.
But our exhaustion runs deeper than end-of-year fatigue. It comes from watching the slow unraveling of our schools—our culture, our traditions and our sense of community. Yet again, we are losing dedicated support staff. We are losing beloved colleagues. We are losing trusted principals. We are watching people get shifted and shuffled like a deck of cards. It is heartbreaking, and it is exhausting.
This time of year is normally when educators begin to recover—rest, reflect and engage in professional development to prepare for a new year. Instead, many teachers will spend their summers packing up
classrooms, relocating to new sites and preparing to set up again—with little time to do it, and with keys to their new classrooms possibly arriving just two days before school starts.There is real anxiety—about timelines, about workload, about the future of other schools and programs. This summer will not be restful. It will not be restorative.
On top of the anxiety we feel as teachers, parents and students, there is also a persistent level of distrust between us and district leadership. This is based on the conduct we all observed during the contentious contract negotiations where district leadership hid behind lawyers and blatantly self-serving legal explanations instead of just voting out in the open.
Speaking of doing things out in the open, why are you only discussing the appointment of an Interim, or as of now Acting, Superintendent in closed session? Why isn’t that a discussion you want community and stakeholder involvement in? Have you considered that maybe the board’s inability to conduct a successful Superintendent search is because you fail to incorporate community voices and perspectives? Maybe this is a good time to correct that poor practice.
But, despite this mistrust, we recognize that we must find a way to work together. And to do that, we ask you, the board, to lead with humanity. This is not a business of widgets. In fact, it’s not a business at all. This is a public school system, made of people—of children, of families and of educators.
We must move away from the mindset that educators are just line items in a budget. We are not cogs in a machine. We are human beings doing hard, messy, important human work. Treat us that way, and you’ll find we can and want to help.
And, we have another request for you: as you consider the next superintendent, we ask that you post the job on EdJoin. Expensive search firms have failed to deliver candidates that meet the needs or the expectations of this district for three searches in a row. Don’t waste more money going down
that road again and expecting different results. We have people in this community—people who understand small districts, and who understand what it takes to build trust, equity, and stability—who are ready to serve.
We end with this: For the first time in a long time, we see the potential for a cohesive board—one that can rise above the weeds, get out of operations and turn to governance, and make decisions that genuinely support students, staff and our community. That gives us hope. In that spirit, we offer you our support and our willingness to collaborate. But we ask that you give us the same in return.
Thank you.
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