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PW: So tell me roughly how long was Superintendent Chaconas in place?

MY: I believe he left around 2000.

PW: So it was almost a decade of that work being developed and implemented?

MY: Well, I think there was a decade of work that went on, but I think he was there for probably about five years, I think.

PW: And so you were saying that, with the change, things shifted, but there was still positive work being implemented through the Unified School District. Can you tell me more examples?

MY: One of the programs that we did with Superintendent Chaconas was with the CARE program. It was really an interest in supporting youth and understanding that youth needed to be supported, particularly in a racially heightened environment. And so with CARE, we started a program called CARE Multicultural Student Relations Program, it was an afterschool program where we invited students at the three high schools, Alameda High, Encinal High and Island High, continuation high school, to participate in a cohort of leadership development around racial identity and understanding the dynamics of institutional racism. And four of us volunteered to do that program the first year, Leonard Spadoni, Kathy Fong, myself, and Vicky Smith. And then we got some funding, and Vicky, who was part of the founding of CARE and a longtime activist in the Black community, became kind of the CARE staffperson, and she began to organize the program at all the schools through some grant funding that we had. And we found that to be a really productive way to focus down and impact the lives of young people. And Niel's son, Austin Tam, was one of the first people to participate in the program, and I remember he wrote an editorial in the newspaper about what it meant to be Chinese American and what it meant for him to speak up, and within his culture, kind of find voice and so forth, and just cultivating leadership in that way. So that continued even after Chaconas left, for several years, but there just wasn't the infrastructure of the initiative in place any longer. And Vicky ended up continuing to run that program, and then she shifted gears because our funding was running out, and she became the McKinney-Vento representative, that was around the homelessness provisions for communities that were undergoing changes in military bases. And she began to focus on homeless youth that had no residences but were registered in the school district. And so she morphed the program from the racial dynamic to the support for homeless youth and their families, for that matter, until she retired a few years before I retired.

PW: Tell me... and then I know that there was some work towards the affirmative action...

MY: Yeah, I mean, Chaconas was very proactive in bringing in people of color, teachers, administrators. What we had found before he came in was that the affirmative action office had been dormant for many years. It had been under the stewardship of a man named Don Sherait. And, actually, Don, we had to have some really challenging meetings with him and Roy to kind of let him know what the goal was around things. And to me, to Don's credit over the years, he came to understand, he said, "I think I understand what you guys have been talking about as a Caucasian person, longstanding in the community." It was very rewarding for us to become friends, and for him to support the work that needed to be done and become proactive in it as well. But that went in tandem with when Chaconas was coming on as superintendent and being proactive himself because he had many contacts of people that he would be able to recruit into the community. And then I think, I got away from the school district work, coming into the 2000s when Chaconas had left the community. So I don't know all that went on during that period. But one of the things that Chaconas did do was, even though Niel had been sort of blackballed for his role in the controversy around the Asian community, Chaconas did appoint him to a vice principal position at Woodmill school, and then later he went to Miller as the principal and then became principal at, I guess it's the former, gosh, Washington school, which he helped change their name into Maya Lin elementary school.

PW: This is Niel Tam?

MY: Niel Tam. And he became, actually, a well-respected administrator in the district, and then kind of, again, a model like Keith was, of how to work with diverse approaches to things. And when he retired, he actually ran for the school board and he won and then eventually became president of the board at a certain point in time. And he also became a champion for LGBTQ curriculum at a time when it was very controversial, and took a lot of attacks to that as well.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.