Superintendent Fal Asrani leads California’s Marysville Joint Unified School District with three keywords: wellness, communication and celebration. These three priorities also drive her campaign to restore the nation’s respect for education and educators.
Her focus on wellness stretches back to a decline in behavior that started during the pandemic and has been exacerbated on social media, an ever more aggressive news cycle and heightened contentiousness at school board meetings. Constant communication is one of her main tools in maintaining the community’s health in and outside her buildings.
Asrani has held dozens of town hall meetings and coffees with staff in each of Marysville’s 24 schools. She also hosts a meeting in one of the district’s neighborhoods each month. “Communication has become the cornerstone of what my leadership has become, which is ‘Be present, be seen and, when necessary, bring the truth to the surface,'” she explains. “There are so many opportunities for truth to be clouded now.”
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“Celebration” means recognizing the district’s achievements and its ambitious goals for transforming K12 education. Recently, the district has worked with local universities to launch robotics and coding programs that stretch from kindergarten to high school. It has also partnered with a regional water agency, which provides an engineer to work with students in an engineering pathway.
“The exciting part I feel is doing things differently,” Asrani continues. “And that’s a celebration. Because now we’re looking at innovative thinking … the innovative thinking of our leaders, our teachers, our support staff and our parents. And so the role of the superintendent is to guide the thinking to the good places, to what education and public schools are about.”
She further celebrates her students by ensuring they have ample opportunities to make their voices heard. She and her team hold monthly meetings with the student governments at Marysville’s high schools and middle schools. For example, those students convinced the district’s administration to add honors classes—with space for more than 500 students—in middle schools, she points out.
Asrani also has a seat on the Greater Sacramento Education and Economic Commission, which comprises city and county officials from the region along with local employers. “I’ve said to them, ‘Education must be the focal point of economic development. We are the ones that give you the pipeline of employees,'” she contends. “So that’s been my bigger focus about bringing back the respect, public school education and educators deserve.”
This level of community involvement reflects how the superintendent’s job has shifted away from day-to-day operations as other administrators pick up the slack. “In this political, shifting world the superintendent of schools is no longer about running the school district,” Asrani concludes. “Our job is to position our district so that it’s integral to the community we serve and the business development of the region.”
