Rachael Maves: Hi everyone. You are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today. We are talking to Melanie Matta. Melanie Matta is superintendent of Hope Elementary School District and has dedicated over 20 years to advocating for educational equity and Bridging the achievement Gap in underserved communities. Melanie, I'm super excited to have you on the podcast today.

Welcome.

Rachael Maves: [speaker uncertain] Thank you so much so I wanted to just jump in a little bit. We always start off the podcast with wanting to hear people's stories. You know how much we value voice at Parsec and want to uplift the stories of Educators in the field and understand just why you chose a career in education.

Melanie Matta: Yeah, it really goes back to when I was a little girl, probably 5 years old. My grandparents have a 100 Acre Ranch in Orosi, California, and the way that my grandpa communicated with the fieldwork workers was through a big chalkboard and he would write down the tasks of the day, of the week and all the things and it had a big wraparound porch and so when I would go over to Grandma and Grandpa's house, I would erase whatever he had for the Farm Workers that day and play teacher right, I'm, I'm writing my ABCs, I'm, I'm writing, you know, math problems and all the things. And then when my cousins would come over, that's when I really was like, oh, I can do this teacher thing. And then, as we continued to get older, oh, now I'm the principal, so you are in trouble and you need to go to the principal's office, and so really it. I didn't have anybody in education when I was growing up that I knew that was in my family. But I really valued my teachers and I valued what I was learning in the classroom and I emulated that from a very young age and it just continued that I wanted to be an educator, I wanted to do what my teachers did and I wanted to impact kids.

The way that I was impacted when I went through their classrooms.

Rachael Maves: I love that. Do you have a story of like a favorite teacher or an event that just highlights how the education or those teachers really impacted your life?

Melanie Matta: Yeah, really, they were all my favorite teachers. I'm pretty vocal and social and every report card period right. My teachers would say: your daughter is very. Talkative, but that really just it speaks volumes to. They never stifled my need and my Hunger for conversation, but every single teacher that I had embraced that and fostered that and fostered my not only just my wanting to have deep and Rich conversations about anything and everything, but really just fostered that leadership ability in me, kind of all throughout the grades because I was typically the one that you know gathered my group together and started the process of you know, whatever task that we were given. So really there's not necessarily a standout teacher, but every single one of them in my educational career really f fostered the love of learning and fostered in me that I could do anything that I wanted to, that I could lead, that I was strong and I felt that about all the other kids in the class.

So I was very fortunate to have really amazing teachers from kindergarten all the way through College.

Rachael Maves: Really I love that and I love just hearing teacher or adults being able to see those things in kids that potentially could drive them crazy. Right, that could become something that the teacher is like: please, she needs to stop. But instead seeing how that can be a strength and then finding those proper Avenues to Channel that, I just I think that is when we give those opportunities to kids and I even think about it with my three daughters it they flourish, there's a confidence, there's a strength and a foundation. In the core of who they are, and I love M. That is your like experience that you're bringing then into wherever you're leading.

Melanie Matta: Yeah, they helped build the leader in me, right, because they didn't stifle my voice but used it to help lead.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I love that story. I, before we go into the next question about really what kind of keeps you up at night, I do just want to give you a chance to highlight some of the success in your district, and that's why I was so excited, too, to have you on the podcast when you know, at Parsec we love data and we're constantly looking at our partners data the qu, the quantitative, and now the qualitative, also with real and I mean you saw some massive gains I unprecedented over the last few years, and I'd love for you just to be able to share a little bit about that and about what you attribute to that success and the work that you've done with your staff, the impact that it's had on your kids.

Melanie Matta: Yeah, so I came into a district that really was dysfunctional and every kind of grade level functioned as an island in itself, and so there was really no cohesiveness to the team. So I gathered everybody together and I just got all of their thoughts around. You know, where do you want to be? Like, our school is one of the lowest performing schools in the county. Do we want to be here? And if we don't, then we've got some things to do, right.

So there's definite changes that needed to be made, and so I did that with the entire Community, right? My teachers, my AIDS, my parents, even students, the board, and so we kind of made decisions very early on what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it, and then we just dug into the work. And once we started to dig into the work, we started seeing the results. But it wasn't just we didn't want to just see the results, we wanted our kids to know and to be able to own those results, because it really wasn't about us per se, it was about them. So once we got all those balls rolling, then pandemic hits.

Rachael Maves: Oh my gosh, right.

Melanie Matta: So HH, it just took the wind out of our sales. Cuz, here we are, we're just plugging along and we are continuing to do amazing things in the classrooms. Our kids are owning their data, because when we own, it can only go so far, but when they own, it goes exponentially further. And the conversations that were happening out on the playground, in the parking lot, in the classrooms, were far different then from when I first got here, which is they don't know why they're getting the grade that they're getting. And now they're coming and advocating for: hey, I got a D on this assignment and I do know what I did wrong. But I asked my teacher if I can retake the test after I study and she said yes, because ultimately she wants to see what I know.

I.

Rachael Maves: Yes, that is just like music to every Educator's ears, like that's how it should be set up, right.

Melanie Matta: Yeah, they would catch me in the parking lot, cuz I'm in the parking lot greeting parents and kids every morning and they would say, Mrs. Matta, I really didn't score my best on the SRI, but I know I can do better. Can I have an opportunity to retake that test? Or it's Mrs. Matta, I scored a 100 points more. I'm so proud of myself.

Rachael Maves: And then it's, you know, parking lot high fives and all the things, yeah. And so when we're giving that data over to them, look at how much more powerful it is coming from them than it is coming from my staff sharing it with me or sharing it with them. Yeah, that student agency, I mean there's. I don't think that there's anything that replaces that of kids being able to own, understand, know and then see the growth and traction.

Melanie Matta: I mean when you start to see the change, that's when the excitement builds. And over, I mean over three years, you guys made double digit gains in like the 20 percentiles within your District, which is huge, by just really aligning the staff, getting everyone kind of rowing the boat in the same direction, getting really clear on your curriculum and then empowering kids to be partners in that work, which I think is the model Melanie, that is beautiful for others. Thank you, and I want to go back to you know. The pandemic hit and so we struggled. We still delivered exceptional content and we were one of the very few districts in the subsequent year of testing to grow in our test scores. But we lost quite a bit of momentum in all of that.

You know, data sharing and all of the goal setting and all of the things that we knew were good work. Because now the staff is worried right, we're worried about covid, we're worried about learning loss, we're worried about, you know, just ABCDE you can name them all and so we lost a little bit of that momentum. And so now it's the reset time and really going back to what we knew pre pandemic worked for our district. I mean, we've still been seeing gains, but not as exponentially as we had, because we kind of lost that, all of the momentum with, you know, Gathering our student data, sharing it with our kids, making sure they were, you know, tracking their own data and setting goals and things like that. So we've got we're working on that again.

Rachael Maves: You know we've got some work to do in that area, but just keep watching, we got it. Control. We will be shoulder toosh shoulder in this work abely well.

Melanie Matta: That's a great segue into when you think about like one or two things in particular that keep you up at night. What would you say that those are for you? Yeah, the first one is Staff burnout. Rachael, I really thought we really had it all together during covid. We continued to deliver great instruction. We were one of the first districts to bring our students back to in-person.

Instruction, and so we thought we had this all in the bag, that we were just going to continue life as normal. But life hasn't really continued as normal, and no matter how many times I try to say, oh, we got this, we're good, my staff wasn't good and I wasn't good, and we really recognized that together at our staff Retreat this school year, that we weren't good last year, that we were burnt out. We were burnt out on beh behaviors. We were burnt out on social, emotional you know concerns of our students and our staff. We were concerned about increasingly violent behaviors with students just across the board. All kinds of things were just burning us out, and what I noticed was my staff doesn't want to do anything extra.

They just want to go home at the end of the day and leave school at school, and that be that.

Rachael Maves: And so did I yeah, so did I. And where I would normally dig in and do all of the extra work, I was just as burnt out as they were, and so that's really what keeps me up at night is how to then rebound from all of that burnout that we've been experiencing, to try and rally the troops back and Forge forward, doing the work that we know how to do and do. Well, yeah, I love that you have your on that. One of our other guests on the podcast, Terry Meer, is the superintendent at daer and, like you, she saw a similar Trend with her staff, and we talk a lot about like students and creating those environments for students for that kind of social emotional health, but I think that sometimes we forget that the teachers and the adults within the organization are just as important and how do we Foster that for them? Because the pandemic hit. But, just like you said, we saw so many declines coming off of the pandemic that the work of Educators was just starting and being able to and having to look at how do we accelerate growth at a more rapid Pace than what we were doing before.

I mean, it's it's a lot of continuing to roll up our sleeves and have tough conversations. So, yeah, I appreciate that.

Melanie Matta: Hy, yeah, so, as you're thinking about that, what are the two ways that you're thinking about moving forward or, surpris, providing that support? What does that look like for your District? Yeah, I really wish that the state would reconsider the admin to teacher ratio, because in small schools like mine, I am literally the everything right. I'm the superintendent, I'm the teacher. I subbed in the cafeteria for two hours yesterday. I've, you know, been in classro subbing so that teachers can get a break or can go to a training that I've got going on for them.

You name it, I've done it right. Kid makes a mess in the bathroom and my custodian is sick today, so guess who's you know helping clean it. The superintendency, or the administration, isn't sustainable if we don't relax the admin to teacher ratio, specifically for small school districts, who now have a ton more on their plates that are not allowing them to be the educational leader in the school that they need to be. We need to be in the classrooms. We need to be continuing to be effective in instructional practices. We need to be continuing to show our faces to our teachers and our students in their learning environments so that they know that we are their support system, and right now we can't do that because the admin to teacher ratio for schools, for a small school like mine, doesn't allow it.

Right, I'm doing a lot of my work on the back end at home because I can't get it done during the regular school day.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, so I'm really looking forward to having conversations with the state. About giving some a little bit of reprieve for those of us Smalls that are really struggling in that area. Yeah, and C you're you ra, such a great point because California is an interesting makeup of their school districts. They and it differs across other states, right. So in some states your county counts as an entire district and so it almost mitigates it from ever becoming like these, really tinies. But in California that's not the case, and so you have 69% of your schools that are considered small school districts.

That can, you know, be as small as seven students, and then a and then the impact that has trying to balance policy with, you know, districts that are 500,000 students. Right, and I know, Melanie, you have served as the board of directors on the board of directors for the small school districts Association.

Melanie Matta: As you guys are having kind of conversations around that, what do you see other small school districts doing? Or how are they really kind of Fielding that challenge that you just discussed? Yeah, they're doing what I just did this last year. We're really having to be creative with our funding, and it's conversations with the Auditors, right, because they're the ones that are going to kind of ding us or pass us through. So it's it's conversations about how can I fund this extra person to take some of the load off. So I have funded through a couple of different sources.

Like I have my support person funded partially through elop because she's running a lot of my elop programming and things. I partially fund her through ELO-P and I partially fund her through general fund because she's doing a lot of. Just sort of work around Student Activities and student connectedness and all of those things. But I also have her taken care of a lot of the discipline and so I kind of have had to fund her. A 6040 split, according to the admin, to teacher ratio, right, and so she's 40% Administration and 60% student. Services.

But I just kind of have to uniquely fund her so that there is a support when I need support, when I need to be in the classrooms.

Rachael Maves: She's, you know, either doing the discipline or coming up with the student activities and things. Otherwise I don't know how I could continue to sustain the work that I'm doing without the burnout.

Melanie Matta: Yeah, that makes sense as we start to kind of wrap up here today. What question in education are we not asking that we really should be? I'm so glad you asked this because really it comes down to funding. It's: how do we adequately fund and protect small school districts so that we can offer program programming that the large districts can offer? Like right now, I don't have a gymnasium and I know that prop two is on the ballot right and I'm really hoping that voters vote for prop two, because prop two the way that it's written Now is really supposed to help and support small school districts and be able to set aside a pot of money for things that we don't have, maybe that other districts have. So I don't have a gym, and so that would set aside a little bit of money from that those prop two funds so that a small rural School District like mine can have that for my students.

I currently don't have a working cafeteria. I have a place for students to sit, but I don't have a cafeteria, so I have to bring in food from another school district to feed my kids, and so that's not quite as cost effective, right, because now you're having to pay their food costs, the travel, the all the things, right, the paperwork, all of it, and so I'm really looking. In my position with SSDA and my position now as the chair of the access small schools committee, I'm really looking to push for how can we adequately fund and protect our small school district funding so that we can have the things that larger districts have? You know, I don't have a music teacher, an art teacher. I know that we've been given funding for it, but nobody wants to do a part-time job. They would much rather have a full-time job.

Rachael Maves: So I lose those people to the larger districts who can pay them full-time. So it's just very hard when we don't have the adequate funding to do everything that the larger districts can do. Yeah, I, you know you touch on something that I think is really important, especially being able to find staff, and it almost circles back to what you started with about staff burnout. Because when and I think you know this, but when I was a superintendent, I was a superintendent of a small school district and similarly, there were positions that I mean we had to get creative and look at can we share, potentially, staff and I'll take a 20% FTE and then somebody else does a 20%, Then somebody else does a 20% so that we can collectively provide that full-time position. But then it puts the staff in a position of having to then travel to all of these different schools, yes, and then we talk about and again that exacerbates that burnout because it puts the onus then on the staff. But you want to be able to provide those things for your kids.

So, yeah, it's.

Melanie Matta: It's definitely a chess game puzzle, putting together a puzzle, braiding funds. How can we make it in Smalls? Yeah, yes, I'm pretty fortunate that here in terer County our County office provides a lot of support to Smalls, and so I currently contract with them for the Arts, so I have someone come out and do an arts program, you know, musical theater and all the things. But I'm thinking about counties, maybe, that don't, or districts that don't have access to that. You know, and I, like you, have contacted other districts to see how we can share people. But when you're in rural settings and you're a small and the distance from my district to your district is an hour, that's right.

Yeah, you know that's not exactly feasible for somebody. So, anyway, I'm really looking forward to, in my roles with AXA and SSDA, to really advocating for small school funding because we need it.

Rachael Maves: We're unlike The Bigs and we can do far more with far less. We've been doing it for a long time, but it would be really awesome if we didn't have to do far more with far less, because if we got a little bit more, we can continue to do exponentially more. I love that's a great note to end on. I just want to say thank you, Melanie, for joining me today.

Melanie Matta: I really appreciate your perspective, your heart and passion for small school districts and for your local community. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Rachael.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.