WCCUSD’s school board will welcome a new trustee this winter: Caitlin Garibaldi, a Fairmont Elementary parent and animal-care professional who was uncontested for the Area 5 seat. Also reelected by default for a third term is incumbent board clerk Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy, a former bilingual teacher and longtime teachers union leader.
Garibaldi, an El Cerrito resident, will represent El Cerrito, Kensington, East Richmond Heights, Richmond Annex, the Richmond Marina and Point Richmond. She told Richmondside she was inspired to run for office as a parent frustrated by what she saw as inequities across the district and galvanized by last year’s teachers strike and subsequent cuts to programs and positions.
Gonzalez-Hoy, who first won his Area 4 seat in 2020, will continue to represent parts of El Sobrante and Richmond, including Hilltop.
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Garibaldi will be the only new face on the five-person school board, a governing body that oversees the district’s finances and operations. Trustees collectively appoint the superintendent and have the power to cut or create new positions, approve terminations and provide guidance for contract negotiations between teachers and other district staff. Trustees also oversee the district’s budget and offer fiscal oversight.
Garibaldi is succeeding Leslie Reckler, but the two are very different. Unlike Reckler, Garibaldi doesn’t come from an education or corporate background.
Reckler was a more fiscally conservative voice on the board, urging the district to make budget decisions she believed were difficult, but necessary, to avoid state oversight and lessen financial strain. During the teachers strike and last year’s budget cuts, Reckler favored a more modest raise for teachers to avoid additional cuts.
Garibaldi, instead, is endorsed by United Teachers of Richmond and said she decided to run after seeing how teachers were treated leading up to and during the four-day strike last December.
The catalyst, she said, was when she saw a lock on the teachers’ portable restroom outside of Fairmont Elementary, where her daughter attended kindergarten.
“I was already feeling so angry and sad for them (the teachers), and I saw that, and that was just what I needed to kind of push me over the edge and be like, ‘You know what, maybe I’ll try to actually do something to help,’ ” Garibaldi told Richmondside. “It should’ve never gotten to a strike.”
She said as a parent she also noticed how parents had different access to information, and how daunting it was to know how to get the right services for children and get answers from the district.
For example, Garibaldi said she knew how to navigate getting special education services for her daughter because her friend had gone through it. She also knew how to sign up her child for transitional kindergarten because her friend, who is married to a local city council member, guided her through that process.
“I had somebody who already knew what they were doing and guide me through it and tell me exactly what I needed to do to get her evaluated and to get services, and I realized through talking to a lot of therapists that work with these kids that that’s not always the case,” Garibaldi said. “I got really lucky, and some kids fall through the cracks and never get their services, or their parents have to fight incredibly hard for them. And my daughter got them at 3.
“I knew everything that I had to do because somebody helped me, and so many people don’t have that help. And I feel like we need to make things just easier,” the incoming trustee said.
Garibaldi discloses three main goals for her term
Garibaldi said she has three main goals in this four-year term, which begins in January. The first is to achieve fiscal stability without making cuts to programs or schools, and to her this means increasing attendance and enrollment. The second is to retain and recruit more teachers and stabilize staffing. And finally, she also wants to make schools more equitable and ensure all students have access to the same resources like career pathways in high schools or robust special education services at every school site.
“I want to make sure that every single student has access to the tools they need to succeed and to thrive, and I realize that looks different for every student, and that’s why I really want to focus on the programs that we have at schools and make sure that students don’t have to go to a school that isn’t their home-school just to get a service, Garibaldi said.
“I also feel like my priority should really be listening to the community and seeing what their priorities are, and so I feel like (her priorities) are going to be kind of ever-changing,” she continued.
Garibaldi said she was looking forward to campaigning and meeting voters, since it was her first time seeking public office. But no one filed to run against her. So, instead, she will be campaigning in favor of the WCCUSD parcel tax, Measure V, and hopes to host listening sessions with the community before she officially takes office.
Initially, there was a chance Garibaldi was going to face off against Kristin M. Sangren, who ultimately decided not to run. When the two had a meeting, they discovered how aligned they were and Sangren dropped out.
“At the end of the day, I don’t care if it’s me sitting up on the board … I just want to make sure that the person who sits on the board is going to center our community,” Garibaldi said. “I (met with her because I wanted) the security of knowing that if I didn’t win this race, the person who did get up there was going to do the same thing that I was going to and really fight for our community — and I think that she would have.”
While Garibaldi has never run for office, she is no stranger to the behind-the-scenes work of local politics. Before starting her campaign, she was volunteering to support Claudia Jimenez’s run for Richmond mayor.
Before becoming a mom, Garibaldi also worked on the No to Prop 8 campaign to protect gay marriage and worked for Marriage Equality California and Equality California.
“In high school and college, I also used to canvas constantly for candidates and phone bank,” Garibaldi said. “One of the things that I was the most excited to do when I turned 18 was register to vote. I was so freaking excited.”
She said growing up in Sacramento, her mom always emphasized the importance of voting and civic duty.
Garibaldi moved to the North Bay to attend Sonoma State, where she studied sociology. She had planned to get her masters in social work, but “life got in the way.”
“I kind of love that I didn’t end up doing that because I make a living playing with dogs all day,” Garibaldi said. “But I love people. I am really like a people, community-focused person, and I kind of gravitate toward things that give me the ability to help in some way.”
Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy looks ahead to a third term
Gonzalez-Hoy’s path to the board began when he first immigrated to San Diego from Mexico at age 13. He was learning English and said school was incredibly difficult for him because there weren’t as many resources for English language learners at the time.
He was placed in special education classes in an effort to make up for the language gap.
“They could not help a bilingual kid, so they put me in a special education class, which actually hurt me much much worse rather than help, especially my consciousness and just my emotional body,” Gonzalez-Hoy told Richmondside. “So I’m constantly going back to that. I don’t want students to ever go through what I did, no matter what…I think every push, every decision, every conversation I have with staff is because of that.”
He graduated from high school and even was part of the high school’s surfing club before moving to Northern California to attend Sacramento State. There, he was introduced to Teach for America.
“I had actually always been curious about teaching because two teachers changed my life from entering high school and supported me on their own to be semi-successful in high school and that always stayed with me,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “So I applied and they placed me in San Pablo.”
He said that was the start of him finding his community after leaving his home in Mexico. He met his wife, who was a sixth grade teacher, while he was teaching seventh grade and they have two daughters — the oldest who will be starting transitional kindergarten next year.
Gonzalez-Hoy was a bilingual teacher at Bayview Elementary and said he was seeing so many bilingual and newcomer students fall through the crack.
“I started questioning why that is,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “And no one could answer those questions for me.”
He said he gathered district student performance data from the last 16 years “of the district failing students that look like me” to present to the school board “and they also couldn’t answer my questions so I decided to advocate through my union.”
“I became president of the teachers union to push for better outcomes for students through the power of the union,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “And then, you know, once that work was done for me through the union, I decided to step up and do the governance work because I felt like there’s so much more work that we need to do, and I felt like there was work that was not done.”
Since then, trying to create more effective programs for English language learners and newcomer students has been the trustee’s north star. But throughout that process, he said he also learned more about the achievement gaps in other student groups, particularly African American students and those with different abilities.
He said his priorities this term are to continue closing the achievement gap for all student groups, finding ways to increase attendance and enrollment, stabilizing staffing for teachers, administrators and all other school personnel, and creating a safe and inclusive school environment.
“That’s more than just obviously feeling safe in the classroom, but feeling safe, you know, outside of the classroom,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “There’s no bigger metric to changing student achievement than to have a strong teacher, right, or a strong climate of a school.”
To him, that means having consistent staff that create an inclusive environment and a site’s own culture. It also means being inclusive and equitable for all students, regardless of religion, ethnicity, race or gender.
He said the goal is to create long-term structural changes and keep students centered at all decision-making. Some examples include how the board saved the music program across the district, blocked staffing cuts at Kennedy High School and passed a motion to delay any more cuts for the next two years after the district got a last-minute state funding boost. He was also a very outspoken supporter of teachers during the strike.
Gonzalez-Hoy currently works as an organizer with the California Teachers Association to support teachers in Solano and Napa County. Last year, he was part of the WCCUSD board majority that sided with union demands, while some of his board colleagues argued for more fiscal stewardship.
When asked if his current role and past experience as UTR president could make him biased on the dias, Gonzalez-Hoy said that it instead informs how he approaches these decisions.
“Both jobs benefit me a lot because I learn a lot about policies through this work that I am able to use in my day job,” he said. “And my day job keeps me really grounded in the difficulties of what staff goes through… and that it’s not just teachers.”
There were a number of people who were also interested in the Area 5 seat, Gonzalez-Hoy said. Zelon Harrison, chair of the school district’s African American Site Advisory Team and a member of the district Local Control Accountability Parent-Students Committee, had filed papers to run but withdrew her candidacy to support Gonzalez-Hoy.
At least one month before candidates had to declare their intent to run, Gonzalez-Hoy said he was sure he was not going to run again. However, a number of organizations and community leaders pushed him to reconsider, he said. And when he decided to go for another term, the other candidates stepped back.
“I actually was able to speak to all of them and I actually encouraged all of them to run, not just because I felt (unsure) but also, everyone could bring a different voice into a campaign that actually could lead to changes,” he said. “But I think that when they all approached me, it was more of like, ‘Listen, if you’re doing it, I want to talk to you about this issue that I really care about,’ and I think that I really listened to them and heard them, and maybe that led to them changing their mind. None of them actually told me like, ‘Oh, I’m not gonna do it then.’ ”
Gonzalez-Hoy was one of the trustees who pushed for higher stipends for board members when teachers received a raise because he wanted more people to run for office.
He speculated that not many are interested in running because the position is hard and takes up a lot of time per week, particularly during the evenings. That means parents of young children, or those who work long hours would struggle to make things work.
He said the role has also become more demanding as districts across the state have struggled with budget cuts, teacher shortages and changes after the pandemic.
“There is quite a bit of expectation from the community to see you at things, to be able to meet constantly, and on top of that, to respond to the issues that are happening,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “And I think that between the national tone of things and just, you know, the lack of supports from the state and the federal government, it’s been harder to be able to achieve a lot of the things that people ask you to do.”
Garibaldi speculated that there is a lack of trust between the community and the district, and that people don’t want to run for the board because they see WCCUSD “as a sinking ship.”
Both incoming trustees, however, say rebuilding that trust will be part of their work.
