The Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees meets in October. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local file)
Pajaro Valley Unified School District board meeting
- 5 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 26 at 275 Main St., fourth floor, Watsonville.
- The meeting will be streamed on YouTube.
- Click here to email the Board of Trustees.
WATSONVILLE >> Amid increased public scrutiny of spending on consultants, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees tabled renewal of a contract with a literacy coach that is paid $4,000 per day.
The consultant is one piece of a larger strategy to improve the district’s low reading scores. Some trustees worry the delayed renewal could slow the fragile progress the district has made with literacy. But teachers at two elementary schools said the coaching was counterproductive, and many staff and teachers have decried what they see as wasteful spending on outside consultants while staff and teachers are laid off.
Former Modesto City Schools administrator Kimberly Newton, whose consulting business is called Leading Literacy Consulting, has been working in the districts’ elementary schools that are underperforming in reading since the beginning of last school year.
Ahead of an Aug. 5 board meeting, teachers at Hall District and Radcliff elementary schools urged the board not to renew a one-year contract that would compensate her $157,500 for 35 days of work — a daily rate of $4,500. Newton’s contracts with the district last year and the first half of this year had daily pay rates of $3,500 to $4,000 and purchase orders from her totaled $239,500, according to district documents.
A group of Hall District teachers that wrote the email described Newton’s coaching as “disruptive” and “counterproductive,” according to a document reviewed by Santa Cruz Local.
A longtime teacher at Hall District, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to workplace concerns, said in a phone interview that the coaching from Newton was essentially a waste of time.
“She would give us certain strategies, but the strategies were not useful for us because they weren’t serving our population, our demographics of students,” the teacher said.
For example, the teacher said, Newton suggested students’ parents could help them with reading exercises, yet many of the students’ parents don’t read or speak English.
In an email to Santa Cruz Local on Tuesday, Newton disputed this concern and said she has experience working in schools with similar demographics as Hall District and had not suggested more homework for parents.
“Throughout the year, morale was positive, teachers were receptive, administrators and literacy coaches were grateful,” Newton wrote. “The focus of my work was to support the implementation of research-based literacy practices.”
Superintendent Heather Contreras, who picked Newton to be a literacy consultant for the district, wrote in an email that, “Prior to working with Ms. Newton, both site principals worked with their teachers to see if teachers were interested in the support, and teachers agreed.”
Contreras wrote that “exit surveys following the professional learning delivered by Ms. Newton have all been positive,” and added that “if teaching staff do not feel a strategy is effective for them, we work to listen to staff and work collaboratively with them on next steps.”
A plan to improve reading scores
Less than 13% of third graders in PVUSD were proficient in English Language Arts, according to 2025 test scores. In California, about 44% of all third graders and 15% of third grade English learners were proficient in reading in 2025.
While improving reading scores to pre-pandemic levels has been a challenge across the state, PVUSD has struggled more than other districts to catch up.
Under Contreras’ leadership since 2024, the district has been prioritizing reading scores. Strategies meant to address the gap include the implementation of the 95% phonics curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and consultants like Leading Literacy.
Superintendent Heather Contreras has helmed the district since 2024. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local file)
LETRS, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, is a training program for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers. In 2024, PVUSD implemented an incentive program for teachers to take the LETRS training and receive a monthly $1,500 stipend.
The Hall District teacher who spoke anonymously said they found that training really useful, and thought 95% phonics, a reading curriculum that emphasizes connecting spoken sounds to written words, was having a positive impact in the classroom.
Their main concern about the district’s strategy to improve reading scores is that it felt like a top-down implementation that lacked teacher buy-in — and that it was hard to work with a new consultant who had yet to build rapport or trust.
“It was quite stressful for us to not only try and learn this new program [95% phonics], but to have eyes on you telling you what you’re doing wrong from a person that we don’t know at all,” the teacher said.
Newton said her work included “individualized professional learning opportunities through modeling and co-teaching these instructional practices directly in classrooms.”
Part of teachers’ concern with the literacy contract, and other spending on consultants, is tied to the district’s financial position, recent devastating layoffs of staff and teachers, the threat of school closures, and ongoing contract negotiations between the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers and the district.
In an email to Santa Cruz Local, Contreras said the money that pays for Newton’s coaching comes from one-time funds that are restricted to professional development in teaching literacy and couldn’t be used to pay ongoing teacher salaries.
A call for oversight of consultants
At the Aug. 5 board meeting, trustees debated the contract and how the district might solicit anonymous feedback from staff about their experiences with outside consultants.
Trustee Gabe Medina’s district includes Radcliff and Hall District.
“What I’m hearing from my teachers in my area is this was a really bad experience for them,” he said of the coaching from Newton. Medina suggested there be an evaluation process for consultants, because “if it’s not a good match, it’s not a good match, and we need to determine that.”
Ultimately, Board President Carol Turley and Trustees Daniel Dodge Jr., Joy Flynn and Medina voted to table renewal of the contract until the Aug. 26 board meeting. They also directed the superintendent to devise a mechanism for teachers to submit anonymous feedback about Newton.
Though Turley voted in favor of tabling the contract to make time for an evaluation process, she was upset when reached by phone after the meeting.
“We failed our kids. Our kids are testing in the bottom,” Turley said. “If you can’t read by third grade, it’s almost impossible to catch up. We have a plan, and we’ve been working this for two years, and we’ve seen significant growth in the past year. And now we’re just abandoning the coaching to help those teachers make sure our kids can be successful.”
Trustee Misty Navarro, the sole vote against tabling the contract in a board meeting with two trustees absent, said that she supported allowing the superintendent to implement her strategy for improving reading scores and that the district should allocate the resources necessary for that.
But, Navarro agreed with other trustees during the meeting, saying, “if you don’t get teacher buy-in, I don’t think we’re going to move the needle.”
In an email Aug. 7, Navarro wrote that she was disappointed and tabling renewal of the contract “is a loss for our educators, who were genuinely interested in the professional development it offered, and it is a loss for our students.”
PVUSD teachers and their supporters rally outside a board meeting in February 2025 to oppose layoffs to teachers and staff. (Fidel M. Soto — Noticias Watsonville file)
Though no vote was made to create such a system, several trustees said there should be a process in place for evaluating all consultants’ work and a way for staff to submit anonymous feedback about any consultant. The district has many consultants for professional services, from classrooms to the business department.
Flynn suggested the district require an evaluation of consultants that would be reviewed by the board prior to renewal of a contract.
Board meetings have, in recent weeks, featured heightened scrutiny of consultant contracts. This came to a head last month when the contract for bond consultant Bill McGuire was up for renewal.
Santa Cruz Local reported in June that McGuire was hired by the district to advise on its bond-funded facilities projects, but the contract and the public record lacked specificity as to the work being done. He was hired to work one to two days per week at a cost of $200,000 per year to the district — paid out of the voter-approved bonds in 2024’s Measure M — with no clear deliverables available for review by trustees or the public.
McGuire told this publication in an interview in June that he advises the district’s facilities and business staff “to make sure that we’re utilizing the bond funds in the best way possible and helping coaching the team, who’s fairly new at this work.”
McGuire’s business partner Terry Bradley, who died shortly after being contracted by the district in June 2025, had previously been charged for bond bidding fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but paid a settlement that did not include an admission of wrongdoing. McGuire said Bradley was never convicted and that any suggestion he was guilty was “character assasination.”
These articles provoked concern and anger over financial transparency among some district staff, parents and trustees. At last month’s board meeting, Medina was strident about his disapproval of the superintendent for bringing on McGuire, and moved to pull the item from the consent agenda for discussion. But with no votes on his side, the consent agenda, and McGuire’s contract renewal, were approved without discussion.
At the Aug. 5 meeting, Trustees Jessica Carrasco and Olivia Flores were absent, and the board lacked the votes to approve the consent agenda without discussion.
The contract renewal for Leading Literacy and a plan to solicit anonymous feedback is expected to come before the board at its next meeting, 5 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 26 at 275 Main St., fourth floor, Watsonville.
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Nik Altenberg is a bilingual reporter and assistant editor at Santa Cruz Local. Nik Altenberg es reportera bilingüe y editora asistente para Santa Cruz Local.
