Ramona Unified superintendent ready to ‘slow down’
Special to the Sentinel
Ramona Unified Superintendent Bob Graeff, who navigated his school district through a major fiscal crisis, has announced plans to retire at end of the school year.
“I’ve been 40 years in public education. It’s time. It’s been a long, good road, but it’s time,” said the 62-year-old Graeff.
He said he’s tired, burned out and ready to try something different, but not on a full-time basis. Options include consulting or coaching other superintendents, or perhaps teaching part time.
“It’d be nice to slow down the merry-go-round,” said Graeff, a lifelong educator in San Diego who joined the Ramona district as an assistant superintendent of educational services in 2001 before becoming superintendent in 2008. “I still have enough life and energy to do something different.”
District leaders said Graeff will be deeply missed.
”I hate to see him go,” said 2015 school board president Dawn Perfect. “He’s done a really good job. He’s a team player.”
Perfect said district trustees plan to meet Jan.11 to begin mapping out the process of hiring a new superintendent — hopefully by this spring.
“It’s going to be tough shoes to fill,” she said. “The school district is the single largest employer in Ramona. He’s kind of like the CEO of the largest corporation in town. It’s a tough and stressful job.”
Graeff will be cutting short a contract that is good through the 2017 school year, with total annual compensation of roughly $244,300. He said he wants to spend more time with his wife, Alicia, an assistant principal at Westview High School in Poway, and their two children, Katie, a senior, and Danny, sophomore, at San Pasqual High School.
Part of that family time will involve a couple of bucket-list vacations. Graeff said he’ll take his clan on an “old-fashioned car trip” in the southeastern United States to Nashville, Florida’s Disney World, Atlanta and New Orleans. They’ll visit relatives, eat Cajun food and Graeff will reacquaint himself with the Deep South.
When they return from the road trip, they’ll head to Oahu, the third largest of the Hawaiian island chain for another vacation.
Graeff stepped into the job as superintendent at a difficult time for Ramona Unified. The district has seen enrollment plunge since 2000, falling by nearly 24 percent from 7,200 students in 2001 to 5,590 today as the local population has grown older.
At the same time, several schools were getting older and falling into disrepair. The district has tried six times to pass school bond measures since the 1960s, and each was rejected by district voters. Eventually, Ramona Unified borrowed significant amounts of money to build two new campuses — Ramona Community and Hanson Elementary schools — and improve two others.
Graeff said the decision to borrow wasn’t his, but digging the district out of debt and trying to convince the community to invest in its schools became a top priority. Little progress has been made on the latter.
“It hurts,” said Graeff of his efforts to get a bond measure passed while superintendent. “Do I take it personally? Ramona is a unique community. We have just never been able to put the right message together.”
Graeff took over as superintendent just as the economic downturn was hitting, forcing the state to make big cuts in education funding and leading Ramona Unified to live on a shoestring budget.
With money needed to repair aging campus buildings, the school district by 2013 began looking to sell $4 million in property to raise money and lower debt. The property is still on the market, but Graeff said that the district has dodged slipping deeper into a financial mess by instead refinancing $35 million in debt, saving Ramona Unified a total of $7 million in payments over the next 17 years.
The school district’s fiscal crisis also was dealt with by cutting salaries, benefits and laying off 20 percent of its workforce — going from 800 teachers, administrators, clerical staff, custodians and others, to 650. So many tenured teachers were laid off that class sizes in kindergarten-through-third grade went from one teacher-per-20 students to one teacher-per-27 students.
By this past spring, the district’s $55 million budget had healed enough so that teachers and others could be given an average 4.5 percent pay hike.
Graeff has stayed in the San Diego area for most of his life.
He was born at Naval Medical Center San Diego, graduated from Kearny High School in the San Diego Unified School District, and then from the old California Western University with a degree in music. He sings to this day as a baritone in the choir at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido.
After getting a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, Graeff returned to San Diego where he taught for five years at Kearny High and six years at Hoover High School, before taking his first administrative position as assistant principal at Roosevelt Middle School in Balboa Park. He later became an assistant principal at Mission Bay High School, then moved to Vista High School, where he remained seven years from 1994 to 2001.
“The last eight years in public education in this state have not been easy,” said Graeff. “The job of superintendent in public education is clearly changing. The level of parents who voice very strong concerns — very publicly — has increased dramatically over the past decade. It has coincided with the Internet.”
Additionally, he said, school boards everywhere have become more politically motivated on a variety of issues.
“There were days when the superintendent was held in high esteem,” he said. “I don’t know if that exists much anyplace, anymore.”