Audience Comes First with Matt Pavao Transformative Principal 322

Matt Pavao is a principal in Burlingame, California. The following is a transcript of our conversation. 

I'd love to talk about my school will be a lot lots of things going great at the school in the district. I have a small district in in the Bay Area, like you said, We're right near the San Francisco Airport. We are a school of 338 students k five. We are title one school. We are also school. It's very dedicated to innovation and very dedicated to our community and being a real community school all the school district all the schools in Burlingame are committed to being really community schools. So we're really tight and tight knit community at our and in our district. 338 today? Yeah. You know, we always say about 350, actually, but we just did the count the other day, so 338 Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I've been at the school for eight years. My eighth year at the school. Yeah. As the principal the whole time. Yeah. It's my 20 I think third year in education. I'm done. Teaching and then other administration jobs at middle school and then and then this my first principalship first sponsorship, I'm eight years Hey, yes. Yeah. Yeah, we did. All right. We're doing okay.

Well, yeah, no,

I Well, the interesting thing about the school is I'm only the third principle they've had and Something like they reopen the school. It's the school is hundred years old this year. So it was built in 1919. But it was closed for some years in the end up until about and I think believe 1988. And since then we've only had three principals. So there was the principal there for 10 years. And the one before me was 11. And then mean, so I have, I'm the young still, I'm still the newbie in that group. You know, it's such a wonderful job and a wonderful community that I have such exciting people that I work with, and really inspired teachers and really inspired district that's allows me to have this community that allows me to have this, why they there is an expectation that we continue to push towards a very innovative practices. And we're in the kind of the north end of the Silicon Valley. So a lot of our parents work in the Silicon Valley in jobs that require the creativity and the collaboration and then the, you know, the critical thing that we talked about the communication. So they understand that's an important factor, and what we have to teach, so to give you this wide berth to kind of really push out into some things that aren't You know, you must be on page 25 of the textbook today. And we are. And at the same time, you know, I think we're a good example to other districts in that we have a wide range of students, you know, we have students of all socio economic backgrounds will talk about, you know, we have 27 different languages at the school. And that's not that's typical, actually, for our area, you know, our we have a very diverse population. And in that we still have achieved we were still able to achieve at high high levels of the typical if you want to call them that academic backgrounds, while at the same time really pushing our innovative practices into things like today where we're looking at podcasting or when we're doing a lot of creative work with presentations and so, a lot of creative creativity and design thinking and things like that. Okay,

Yeah, my advice would be one is to reach out to them. A lot of times we have this shutdown method of like you stay on your side of the fence and I'll stay on my side of the fence. But at Roosevelt and in Burlingame, we definitely encourage parent participation. So a lot of the ideas we have come from parent groups, you know, you meet with them after school and or in the evenings and if they're willing to give their time to you, and then you can listen to their great ideas and you can take that and put the educators lens at the same time possibly because not impossible because of the principles that came before me. There was this foundation of real partnership with the parents that I just inherited it worked hard to keep that going. But it's always been part of our culture at the school and in the district that there's a real partnership. And certainly, there are helicopter parents in all walks, but even we don't. We don't I wouldn't say we even have I can't name any that we would have even at my site, but we've always really valued our partnership with the parents and they valued our professionalism. It's really, really a special kind of place in that respect.

 

So hundred years. Yeah, this year Well, 1990 is actually passed over but 1919 we're gonna have the celebration this year.

It's real. And it's a real balancing between honoring what was before you, and then building, you know, continue to build. And so we tried to do that in the years I've been there and it's been successful. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Sure. Let me preface a little bit. We, we so we have this giant wall in our school that we painted this mural on a while back for a lot of different reasons. We had an event, an unfortunate event of some graffiti that we and so it's This speaks to what our parents are like as well, that we, in typically, we just cross out the graffiti move on our day, the parents want to do more we did that. Got it down immediately, and then went about our day and then went to say, No, we want to express who we are. And part of that is our 27 languages that we spoke at the time and I think was 24. We've grown. So we put this wall that said, we are Roosevelt. Roosevelt elementary is my school. And so we and then we wrote in every different language on the wall. We are Roosevelt in that language. So if you had someone who was speaking to golic it's up there if you have Russian it's up there Chinese Portuguese. And after you when you see it, and I look at it almost every day when you come in it's really keeps you focused. So one of the parts we were having struggles with we you know, we have a wee hours about night where we celebrate all the cultures, but we weren't getting party active participation from all our parents. And one of the ideas was, well, we need a translation service to translate our newsletters and we went through that and there's a price to that. And then we thought what we have experts Right here in the school, so we should have an audio audio Translation by our students using podcasts. We'll just attach it right to a link on our newsletters and we so what we do is we have, so we get we put it out to the parents and the teachers in the fifth grade, our students in the fifth grade, come and help us translate our newsletter. And so they would show up on our newsletters go out on Thursdays, they would show up on Tuesdays, I would give them kind of these are the highlights. They would take it home, they write it out with their parents, and then they would come so we had the first year we had Japanese and Portuguese and Japanese Portuguese, Spanish, and not Russian, but I'm forgetting we had one more. And we've now since expanded to Turkish and China we have Mandarin Chinese now. So we're confused. We don't have all 27 right now but it's it's powerful for lots of reasons. If you just take out even the parties, the students feel valued, which is actually the number one piece. There's a technical aspect to it that the kids are learning how to do podcasting, there's a some of these kids knew how to speak the language. They didn't necessarily know how to write it out. So they're even learning their own language which is how to their parents language how to write it out, but so there's children

Well, you just bring up something, it's just my my wife's family comes from China. two generations ago her grandmother came from China and who just passed at 98 years old. And one of the things that her uncle brought up at the thing was even he had a commute there was always a communication issue with them and, and it was powerful it and so the other thing that we s...