New principals named for three Sonoma schools

The 2009-10 school year will begin with new principals at three Sonoma schools: Melanie Blake at Dunbar Elementary, Karla Conroy at Adele Harrison Middle School, and Esmerelda Sanchez Moseley at Flowery Elementary.
Blake has a long history of service in the Sonoma Valley Unified School District. Presently the president of the teachers’ union, she has been a resident of the Valley since the 1970s and is currently serving in her second year as a summer school principal. For the last several years, Blake has worked at Sonoma Valley High School in the Independent Studies Department. In her career she has taught at elementary through the university levels.
Blake has a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership and credentials in Elementary Education with an emphasis in Early Childhood Education, Special Education and English Language Development.
Karla Conroy’s promotion at Adele Harrison comes after 22 years of service with the Sonoma Valley School District. She taught primarily at the sixth grade level for six years at El Verano Elementary School, and then taught Language Arts and Social Studies during a fifteen-year tenure at Altimira Middle School. Most recently she served two years as vice principal for Adele Harrison and Altimira Middle Schools.
Conroy has credentials in Administrative Services, Multiple Subject, and English Language Development. She is surrounded by educational influences as her mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and sister all taught school during their lifetime.
Flowery School welcomes Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, who will replace retiring Principal Joyce Schipper. Moseley has served for the past three years as the vice principal at three elementary schools in the Pleasanton Unified School District.
Prior to her work in Pleasanton, Ms. Moseley served as a Literacy Specialist with Aspire Public Schools in Oakland, and with Literacy Connection Incorporated. She began her career as a bilingual teacher in the Central Valley communities of West Sacramento and Galt, teaching third, fourth and fifth grades.
Raised in a Spanish-speaking home, Moseley learned English in school in an agricultural-based community. At Flowery, she will lead the magnet school’s Two Way Immersion program. Moseley and her husband Steven, an architect in the Bay Area, are relocating to Sonoma.