Charles Santa Cruz cannot possibly pick a favorite memory in 48 years of public education. There are too many to count.
But there is one special piece that encapsulates all those memories: a ring Santa Cruz wears.
The ring is made of gold melted down from some trinkets his mother gave him when she died. He had been unsure what to do with them.
“I had this gold, and I had this great, crazy idea because we had developed at Gilbert High a jewelry-making class,” he said. “’You know what, I’ll ask the kids to melt it down and make me a ring.’”
This was a couple years before Santa Cruz retired as Gilbert’s principal in 2012. He approached the class’ teacher, Shalei Webb, about it, who told him she was unsure how to do it but was willing to have the class take it on as a project.
The completed ring came back when he retired. Inside it was inscribed a number: 13,037.
The number of Gilbert High students who graduated during Santa Cruz’s 20-year tenure as principal.
That’s a lot of impact, but truthfully, far short of the actual number given Santa Cruz’s 48 years in public education, which ended in December when Santa Cruz’s tenure on the Gilbert Public Schools Governing Board ended. After serving two terms, including two years during the COVID-19 pandemic as the board’s president, Santa Cruz, 72, opted not to run for re-election.
Whatever the number, Santa Cruz demurs on taking credit.
“I was blessed to work with some outstanding educators whose primary focus was, ‘how do I work with kids to make their lives better?” he said.
Upbringing
Santa Cruz was raised in Superior, the little mining town 40 miles east of Gilbert. His father was a miner for 36 years, and Santa Cruz also worked in the mines during his summers and as his first job after high school graduation, helping keep the furnaces fed. While it could be 115 degrees outside in the summer, around the catwalk it was closer to 160 degrees.
“It was a great learning experience,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I gained a lot of respect for those individuals who did that for part of their life.”
Santa Cruz said he was an average student in high school and found Arizona State to be overwhelming when he arrived. He said he struggled early but earned his undergraduate degree through many tribulations with the goal of teaching high school English.
“I had some English teachers who were genuine human beings and good for me and inspired me to try that,” he said. “That’s the discipline I selected, and it wasn’t easy for me because, again, I wasn’t prepared.”
Teaching, administrative career
Santa Cruz graduated in December and managed to get a second-semester opening at Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe, which was still a new high school when he arrived in 1974.
“I was at a school where state of the art was pretty routine, and I thought, ‘this is pretty good. I’m going to stay here forever,’” he said. “And that didn’t happen because I finished my degree, my master’s degree, and decided to pursue administrative jobs. They weren’t available in my district at that time so they recommended that I check out Gilbert.”
He had driven past Gilbert from Superior many times but had never been in Gilbert.
“Gilbert at that time had about 7,000 people in the community, a stoplight there in town at Elliot and Gilbert Road and a Mormon church on the corner and Jim’s Dairy Bar, and I was like, ‘are you really going to do this, Santa Cruz?’” he said. “And my visit with (human resources head) Paul Huston and (Superintendent) Wally Delecki was invaluable.”
Santa Cruz was hired in 1981 to be an assistant principal at Gilbert High. A year later, Delecki prevailed upon him to move over to Gilbert Junior High, where Huston soon moved over to be interim principal. Santa Cruz focused on writing policy, handbooks and procedure for that community of teachers and establishing structure there.
A year later, he succeeded Huston. He stayed as Gilbert Junior High principal for 10 years before applying to be principal at Gilbert High School.
Santa Cruz came into the district at an inflection point when the town’s growth — and with it, the school district’s growth — ignited toward the about 273,000 people the town is today. Statewide achievement testing was just going into vogue.
“We didn’t really do so well initially,” he said about GPS. “And that small cadre of administrators got together under Delecki’s direction and said ‘No, that’s not who we’re going to be.’ And from that point we built and built and built, and I think we built from among all of those people from 1981 all the way until the time I retired in 2012, and that includes anybody who worked in the school district, from the bus driver to the teacher in the classroom, the administrator, the district-level person, the clerk, I don’t care, all of us helped to do that. It wasn’t just one person.”
By 2012, though, the district, under a new governing board, was changing directions. Approaching a retirement age anyway and with his service points in tact for a full pension, Santa Cruz decided it was an appropriate time for him to retire.
Back to school
The school board’s majority at the time embroiled the district in controversy. Meetings often dragged on. The board majority passed resolutions against state-adopted standards. Unhappy teachers and administrators were fleeing the district. The district even got national media coverage when board members wanted to redact parts of a biology textbook dealing with sex education.
Santa Cruz said seeing what was happening led him to run for a school board seat in 2014. He said he felt a sense of loyalty to the district and what had been built there.
“There was an element out there that was really interested in breaking it all back down to whatever bare bones they felt needed to be there and doing something different,” he said. “Fine. But when you have something that already has been proven to be something that the community wants and is sought by members of the community and is in fact the reason for many people to move to the community, why was there the need for such drastic (change)?”
Santa Cruz easily won a seat with incumbent Jill Humpherys, who had been in the board minority. In 2016, Reed Carr, Lori Wood and Sheila Uggetti won election, transforming the board. In 2017, the district lured back Shane McCord to be superintendent.
In the period that followed the board members did not necessarily share ideologies but generally were able to find common ground.
“When those three came on the board, somehow or another — and there was an adjustment period, to be sure — months later, we began to see a consensus,” he said. “We often work toward that.”
The board continued to work that way through the COVID-19 period, but the pressures from a divided community mounted. Santa Cruz was serving as board president when it hit.
Though the post generally rotates among board members, the board chose to re-elect Santa Cruz as president for 2021 in the name of stability and in recognition of his calm leadership during the crisis.
Santa Cruz said COVID was the most contentious issue in the community at that time with camps arising quickly.
“It really didn’t matter what anybody said on either side of the issue because there was no right or wrong answer at the time when we were trying to create structures for managing and organizing, develop policies about how to mitigate issues related to that,” he said.
Santa Cruz said board members found themselves in the middle of the camps, a Ping Pong ball having to move from one side to the other.
“In terms of face-to-face instruction, Gilbert did that more than anybody,” he said. “And yet there were people in accused us otherwise.”
Changing conditions
Santa Cruz said he worries the fallout from COVID-19 and the continued divide across the nation could lead the district over time into another period like before 2014. He also worries if the public understands all the problems left at teachers’ doorsteps, that everyone has different conditions in their homes and challenges in their lives.
He recalled as an administrator serving over graduations and watching families come to celebrate their graduate with perhaps a party in the offing. But then seeing others for whom there would be no party.
“It was eye-opening to me that when the ceremony was over, and that flood of people came onto the field to congratulate their sons and daughters, that there were young people who congratulated each other obviously because they had friends in the group and who had maybe one or two people outside of that congratulate them,” he said. “But then they would leave. Alone. Just walk home. And you wonder about that. ... What kind of trauma was that? … And does that have any effect?”
Santa Cruz said he sees education and children as always evolving. What he sees as different in the field from when he started in 1974 is the scrutiny teachers are under from every corner, but also how much more precise, focused and clinical instructional delivery is, based on research.
The kids, he says, have always been smart, but the rapid changes in society and the 24-hour news cycle have been them much more aware of the world around them than their predecessors.
Santa Cruz’s impact across generations is undeniable. When he served on the governing board, it was not unusual for someone speaking to the board at public comment and, whatever their issue may have been, to first acknowledge Santa Cruz as their former principal.
“That is a blessing,” Santa Cruz said. “It really is gratifying that someone would say to you, ‘Hello, even though you’re there (on the dais), I remember you and I remember generally good things about you.’”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. To voice your opinion on this story, connect with us at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
Charles Santa Cruz,
Gilbert Public Schools,
Gilbert High School,
Gilbert Junior High,
Marcos de Niza High School,
Arizona State University,
Superior,
Gilbert,
Wally Delecki,
Paul Huston,
Shane McCord,
Jill Humpherys,
Reed Carr,
Lori Wood,
Sheila Uggetti
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