Celinda Guerrero

I attribute my success to community. Community within my family, community within my school. I couldn't have approached my master's if it wasn't for my mother-in-law and my mom and my husband, who were there to make sure my three kiddos were good - they were small, my youngest was a year when I went back to school. Community means my fellow principal colleagues who we can call each other, text each other, lean on each other to kind of process out loud what's going on. My assistant principal and my dean have been my saving grace - they push me, they listen, they make me feel seen, because they always say a principal's on their own island. But I strongly believe that it is a community, and I think that's also part of my Hispanic culture, my Latin culture, where it takes a community to build, and it takes a village to raise your children. You can't do it alone. If you do it alone, in isolation, you're gonna drive yourself crazy.

The best advice I ever received was in my first year as a principal when I was freaking out, my hands were sweaty all the time, and I was worried about certain parents. Someone looked at me and asked how many students I had - over 300 - and then asked how many parents were causing issues. I said 5. And she goes, well, you have 5 out of how many parents? Just putting things into perspective for me allowed me to breathe. It's about stepping back and making sure it's not the end of everything, because it was just 5 parents who weren't happy at that time. I always remember that, and now I use that when I'm with my teachers. When we're talking about a student or conflict with a colleague, I'm like, okay, there's 60 staff members here on site, and you're telling me two people have some kind of conflict? That's impossible to have 100% where your personalities match or that you get along, right? So once I say that, they're like, oh, that's true.

I would say you need to process your thoughts first - when things approach, I always try to write down and process so that I can speak in a way that is very clear to others, because intent and impact is big. I would say that you deserve to be in that seat. Even now, in my 8th year going into my 9th year, I still find myself with imposter syndrome. I find myself code-switching the way I speak sometimes, because I feel like I need to belong in spaces because I don't think I do. And it's not something that just goes away. So little by little, I've been identifying myself with my name in Spanish. When I introduce myself, I say Celinda versus Celinda, versus Guerrero - taking back pieces of me to show who I am in the space. If I was to talk to another female who wanted to be in this role, I would say be true to yourself, because you deserve to be in that space. And if you are a person of color, I would say stick true to your identity, because that's gonna guide you and ground you in your why. I ground myself in my identity - as a daughter of immigrants, as a Latina, as a first-gen graduate, as a mom of two boys, as a mom of a daughter who identifies as bisexual - and so I carry that with me. I always make sure that I make decisions based off my own true identity, and I deserve to be there. I deserve to be an SE, and I deserve to be in the front presenting.

I think the challenges right now are obviously funding for schools and being expected to do more with less. There are budget cuts, and with budget cuts, you have to make these tough decisions about what is the thing that is of least impact on students that you potentially have to eliminate, and what are the things that are absolutely non-negotiable because they have the greatest impact. The challenging part is that we have zero control around our enrollment, and based off enrollment is how you get money and funded in California. The fact that California's so expensive means we have so many families moving away. Originally, when I had about 336 students, we were trending about 290, and we were fortunate enough where we were able to get more families, so we're at 305. Just by adding those additional 5 kiddos, I was able to save jobs. In my role, there are those difficult moments where you will have to make budgetary decisions, and it has to do with people, so then I'm messing with people's livelihood. That's the challenge - you end up being the villain in someone's story. It's not because I want to, it's because there's no other way of doing anything, because I have no control over the amount of money that I get in my school.

My value that I think of all the time - at my school, our core values, one of them is bienestar, which is a mixture of safety and well-being. It's about ensuring the bienestar of others by thinking about my intentionality and then the impact that I have, because you could have good intentions but your impact at the end could be negative. Regardless of what your intention was, if it had a negative impact, you need to take ownership for that, because you need to ensure that people feel safe and welcomed coming to my school. I think about intersectionality, and we think about Black History Month, Women's History Month, Pride Month, and all those things, and how I need to make sure that I continue that across. Even though there's tensions - because it's elementary, and I get parents who will yell at me around Pride Month - I need to make sure that I hold true to that, because I know that I'm doing the right thing, and I'm doing right by my students, and my staff, and my families.