Sausalito Marin City School District approves dean position

The board voted 4-0, with one abstention, to approve a job description and salary schedule for the new post.

After weeks of discussion, Sausalito Marin City School District trustees finalized details for a new position of dean of students.

The board voted 4-0 on Tuesday to approve a job description and salary schedule. Trustee Alena Maunder abstained on both votes after raising concerns about the position being categorized as management. She also raised an objection about the inclusion of $100 monthly mileage and $50 monthly cellphone reimbursements.

“I’m just not going to vote,” Maunder said. “It’s going to pass anyway.”

Maunder said she was not sure that a management position was the right approach.

“I don’t want parents to look at this and say, ‘My child is not being supported enough,'” she said.

Board president Lisa Bennett said the management issue that Maunder raised could be discussed at a later date. Superintendent LaResha Huffman said she would remove the $100 mileage reimbursement, but keep in the $50 monthly cellphone stipend.

The dean position, which involves an extended annual schedule of 213 days, is intended to focus on offering social and emotional support and discipline for the middle school students. The middle school has been losing enrollment in recent years, and some middle school parents have told Huffman they have “lost faith” in it, Huffman has said.

Trustee Bonnie Hough, who voted in favor of the dean position along with Bennett, Caroline Tiziani and Lauren Walters, said a dean is necessary to elevate the morale and energy in the middle school.

“I think it is clear that we need this position,” she said. “I want some other things too, but if we can’t have a great culture and climate, then we can’t keep the teachers.”

Huffman said she created a salary schedule ranging from $109,034 to $134,098 annually. It is somewhat higher than the teachers’ salary schedule because it would require working longer than the standard 185 days in a teacher’s school year, Huffman said.

The person hired for the position is expected to work closely with school principal David Finnane to set up structures to help provide more stability for the middle school students.

“We need to change the trajectory of the achievement data, and of social and emotional learning,” Finnane said.

“Not only have we been strongly encouraged by lots of stakeholders to have a dean, but we also agree internally that providing the middle school kids with an opportunity to get off to a strong start with a really coherent model will help with social, emotional, academic expectations and accountability,” Finnane said.

The new position is part of a reconfiguration taking place this summer in the district’s school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy.

The reconfiguration, which reshapes the school from two campuses to one, calls for the middle school to move out of the Marin City campus and relocate to the Sausalito campus to join with the elementary school students.

The dean position fills the leadership gap left after trustees laid off the middle school principal and his administrative assistant when the board approved the reconfiguration from two campuses to one earlier this year.

The unified school on one campus is intended to strengthen the school community by increasing communication and sharing resources, save money on the overhead of running two campuses and offer more resiliency and flexibility in teacher staffing.

“I hope we can create a balance between students, teachers and management in order to take the best path forward,” parent Kirstin Thomas said Tuesday. “I don’t want any naysayers to say that we’re creating too much overhead.”