St. Paul Educator Seizes Opportunities, Works Hard in Long Climb to the Top: Hard Work, Commitment Bring Silva to Top

By Doug Belden, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Feb. 4–Valeria Silva’s acceptance into a selective training program that puts her on the fast track toward becoming an urban school superintendent is the latest step in a journey that began more than two decades ago with a trip to Minnesota to visit her sister.

Silva, now chief academic officer for St. Paul Public Schools, was 24 at the time. She spoke no English and was traveling from Chile with her two nephews in December. “My God, it was the coldest day ever,” she recalls of her arrival.

The car broke down on the way to St. Cloud, where her sister lived, and police had to rescue the group. “The four of us were crying,” she said. “I could feel my tears in my eyelashes freezing.”

Despite the rocky beginning, Silva stayed on in Minnesota to learn English and to marry. She worked 70 hours a week as her husband finished his degree, spending her days at a nursing home and her nights at Taco Bell, a job that included cleaning the bathrooms after college students’ post-bar food runs.

“You never should forget where you could be,” she says.

She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. Cloud State, and she began an education career that would take her from teacher’s aide to chief academic officer to, as of last Tuesday, prospective superintendent as one of 12 people accepted into the Broad Superintendents Academy.

The Los Angeles-based program puts leaders from educational and non-educational backgrounds through 10 months of executive management

training, during which time they continue to work in their current jobs. Within 18 months after completing the training, graduates are expected to be serving as superintendents or high-level administrators in urban school districts.

Silva, now 46, says she is not sure where she will wind up after the program. She remarried this summer after her first marriage ended several years ago, and she and her new husband have two sons who will graduate from St. Paul’s Johnson High School next year, so the timing could be right for a move.

But she says all that is in the future. “I just know that everything I have learned, I have learned it from St. Paul. I’m just very grateful.”

Silva started with St. Paul Public Schools in 1986 as an elementary teacher at Adams Spanish Immersion School. She later became principal there and, in 1998, started as director of English Language Learner programs for the district.

Her work in that job got national attention in 2006 when the Council of Great City Schools reported that ELL students in St. Paul had made more progress closing the achievement gap with native English speakers than in any other large district in the country.

That success led to her promotion that same year to chief academic officer under Superintendent Meria Carstarphen. In that job, Silva is one of seven top advisers to Carstarphen, responsible for pre-K-12 education, community and special education, ELL and staff development.

Silva was raised in Chile, the youngest of five children in a middle-class household. Her father had been a military school roommate of Augusto Pinochet, who went on to notoriety as the dictator who came to power in a 1973 coup and ruled the country with an iron hand until 1990.

In Chile, Silva said, opportunities in life were strictly determined by birth. But in the United States, her own experience taught her, “You never have to give up.”

“If you work hard … you can make it,” she said, and it is that sense of possibility that she says fires her commitment to urban education. “The system is still there for it, and that’s my fight. We can’t lose our kids early on.”

She says she hopes the Broad program will give her more skills and greater perspective to serve urban learners in whatever role she ends up in. “You really need a very large toolbox,” she said.

Doug Belden can be reached at dbelden@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5136.

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