On September 9, I sat down with Dr. Steven Kellner just before a school board meeting in the library of El Molino High School to inquire about his past as an educator and his present and future as the new superintendent of the West Sonoma County Union High School District.

L: Where are you from? What is your background?

SK: I am a Chicagoland native, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, went to college in undergrad at Miami of Ohio in Oxford, Ohio. Then I get my teaching credential at Indiana University, Bloomington, then went back to suburban Chicago and started teaching there. I taught English and social science at the high school level for 12 years, then moved into administration. I was site administrator at a large high school district, and for the past four years I was a district administrator for their district office, and now I’m here! That’s the short version of my professional career. Somewhere in there I went back to school and got a doctorate in administration and supervision from Loyola University Chicago.

L: What brought you to West County?

SK: I’ll answer that question from a professional level and from a personal level.  On the professional side, I’ve always been either a high school teacher or administrator, so the structure that I’m familiar with is small elementary districts and a high school district, which I know is not common in most of the country, but it’s my experience and seems to be the experience here, so it seems to be a good fit professionally.  Personally, my wife and I have vacationed in West County for well over a decade and every time we would go home we can say things like “do you know that people actually live there? If there was ever a chance that we could do that…” , and then we would just sort of let it go. We have family in East Bay, and they were always teasing us, saying “come on out, youve got to be out here!”,  and career-wise these last couple of years things sort of fell into place. We have a five-year-old son, he’s a kindergartener at Oak Grove, and West County is the kind of place that we want to raise our family and the fact that personal and professional aspects overlapped made for a perfect opportunity.

L: What do you like about the community so far?

SK: What’s really exciting about West County is that it’s the kind of district that has already been doing really good things, and it’s ready to become that next level of excellent, as opposed to a district that’s been struggling or having difficulties. From the administrative side, that’s the really fun stuff, to go from really good to excellent and I’m excited to be a part of that. I spent most of  July going all around West County. The joke around the office was that I was in my car more than I was at the office! It was great to go out and see where everybody is. I saw all the elementary districts, went to the SRJC, went to the Sonoma County Office of Education, and the part that’s really striking is just how much community support there is from all different community agencies. From all the elementary districts, from law enforcement, fire protection, everybody is just so invested in the schools, and that’s that’s a very refreshing change from where I come from.

L: Any big plans as superintendent? Specific issues you’d like to tackle?

SK: I told the Board when they hired me that I sort of see the superintendent (one of the jobs, anyways) as kind of a cheerleader-in-chief.  I’m the person who gets to go out to all the community groups and brag about all the things that everyone has been doing here, and I can’t do a very good job of that unless I have seen and know what those things are. One of the things on my agenda for this year is to be in the schools as much as possible. One thing you’ll see me doing in the next couple of weeks is going to each of the schools and doing a student shadow day. I’ll take a student’s schedule (selected at random), and go to school. I’ll go to all the classes and be on campus, because I’ve got to get the sense of what it’s like at Analy and El Molino and Laguna if I want to talk about what goes on there. You’ll see me on campus talking to the staff, I’ve got some informal times set up when they can talk to me and tell me what’s going on. I really feel like if I want to be advocating for you guys and bringing the resources that you need, I need to know what you need, and really the only way to do that is to be on campus.

L: What’s your stance on the new Common Core Standards?

SK: From one angle, people look at the Common Core as just another reason to test, and I’m not sure we need another reason to test. But from an instructional purpose, I think the Common Core is really about the depth of learning and applying that learning to real life problems, and that aspect the Common Core is really great. It changes the thinking that in school we have to ‘cover’ this information, we have to touch on all these topics, as opposed to really learning about fewer topics on a deeper level. I think from that perspective, the Common Core has got it right, but on the testing side, I’m not sure we need more high-stakes tests in high school, so it’s sort of a mixed bag.

L: If you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be?

SK:  Gosh, well I’m a former history and English teacher, so my guess would probably skew that direction. You ask me this today, but if you asked me tomorrow I might have a different answer, but today I’ll say Mark Twain. I think he would be an amazing conversationalist and he’d probably make me feel very unworthy of having dinner with him, but he’d probably be pretty entertaining.

I would like to thank Dr. Kellner for his time, and we at Analy look forward to the years to come!