Shoreline Unified School District trustees concluded a months-long search for a new superintendent with last week’s hire of Bob Raines, the outgoing superintendent-principal of a Healdsburg school district. Mr. Raines, who worked as the principal of West Marin School for two years in the late ‘80s, will enter his two-year, $160,000 contract on July 1.
“I’m beside myself, just being able to come back on the West Marin [School] campus,” Mr. Raines said during the sparsely attended board meeting on Thursday. “I’m excited to be here, working with everybody in the community to build success for our students.”
Out of a pool of seven candidates, Mr. Raines swayed trustees by not only his decades of experience in top administrative roles, but also by his background in special education and fluency in Spanish. (Shoreline went without a special education director this school year and boasts a majority-Latino student body.)
Mr. Raines began his career as a special education teacher in Culver City, and will double as Shoreline’s special education coordinator.
“Mr. Raines’s professional areas of expertise are an excellent match for the needs of Shoreline,” said Jill Manning-Sartori, the president of the board of trustees. “We’re really getting what I consider the complete package.”
Previously, Mr. Raines worked for 10 years as the superintendent and principal of Petaluma’s Wilson Elementary School; since 2007, he has served as the superintendent and principal at Alexander Valley Elementary in Healdsburg. Both of those districts at the time had much smaller populations than Shoreline does now, with 240 and 125, respectively compared to 512 this year at Shoreline. But those schools, like Shoreline, receive funding primarily by parcel tax revenue and inter-district transfer fees.
With this hire, trustees have said they will now set their sights on searching for a new principal for Tomales Elementary, which will enter its third year under the leadership of a part-time principal, Jim Patterson. Trustees last month voted to hold off on a principal search until a new superintendent was hired—a troubling decision for many parents, particularly Latinos, who feel the leadership gap has made room for bullying and misdirected punishments and who for months have called for a full-time principal.
Mr. Raines said he plans to tackle that search immediately. “I think the board’s made a smart move,” he said. “We’re going to be working with the community to let them know the process to hire a principal and then to get a good candidate.”
Mr. Raines will succeed interim superintendent Nancy Neu, a Marin County Department of Education employee. Ms. Neu stepped in following the departure of former superintendent Tom Stubbs, who resigned last May after trustees declined to extend his $126,000 contract.
Mr. Stubbs’s departure after just two years at Shoreline sent shockwaves through the community, which railed against the board in the wake of a closed-door decision to oust him in April 2014.
The resulting backlash prompted trustees to reinstate Mr. Stubbs for one more year, at a time when Shoreline faced a projected $1.2 million budget deficit by the end of 2016-17. Through a series of retirement incentive packages authored by Mr. Stubbs that reduced staff to sustainable numbers last year, that deficit has been nearly eliminated.
Despite the long, contentious road to a new superintendent, trustees and attendees at last week’s meeting appeared in high spirits. As a gift, Trustee Avito Miranda presented Mr. Raines with an undecorated, empty Merrell shoebox, as part of an inside joke.
During interviews, Mr. Miranda had asked Mr. Raines what he would do if he were “handed a box” while walking down the street in Point Reyes Station or Tomales.
“Recognizing a poetic man, I realized that this was a metaphor for the district,” Mr. Raines said. “So what I said was, ‘I will take good care of it.’”