Watsonville High grad, filmmaker runs for PVUSD trustee seat: would create student bill of rights

Editor’s note

This is the second of three stories featuring the challengers running for seats on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees.

•••

Gabriel Medina graduated from Watsonville High school in 2010 and went to UC Los Angeles to study filmmaking. He returned to his hometown last year after earning a master’s degree in that field, and has since put down his roots, making movies and teaching the craft at Pajaro Valley High School and Cabrillo College.

Now, he has thrown his hat in the ring to run for a seat on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees.

He will run against incumbent Oscar Soto for the Trustee Area 3 seat, which includes North Monterey County area and a southwestern portion of Watsonville.

Soto, who was elected in 2020 and currently serves as vice-president of the board, will speak to this newspaper in a future story.

Medina says that, for too long, the district has been largely run and overseen by older generations who too often leave young people out of their decision making.

If elected, he would look to create a student bill of rights that he says would safeguard them and give them a seat at the table.

“We need someone with new, fresh ideas to come in and really clean house,” he says. “I want to bring a voice back to the students and not categorize them as kids but as young adults who actually need to have a say in this institution that they are in for hours at a time.”

Medina says he was inspired into public service after learning that the rutted dirt road on which his family lives—and the outdated bus stops—is a way of life in some parts of rural Las Lomas.

While such issues are beyond the purview of the PVUSD Board of Trustees, Medina says the board can still grill Monterey County officials about them.

“I want the county supervisor to come sit in front of our board and explain why our students don’t have sufficient roads, and why they have had that for the past 30 years,” he said.

Medina also says he hopes to build up the district’s ethnic studies program. That issue has come up during several board meetings since Sept. 13 2023, when the board canceled the contract with a company that was providing ethnic studies training to teachers and administrators.

He says those studies are vital in a district that is more than 80% Latinx. Giving students curriculum with characters they identify with, he says, makes them more invested in their education.

“I had to spend thousands of dollars to take Chicano studies at UCLA to learn about my history where I’m from,” he says. “And we have a problem when we want to do that in high school so students can learn about themselves?”

In addition, Medina says the district should do more to support students whose goals fall outside attending a four-year university, and those who want to pursue a career in the arts.

“What are we doing for these students now,” he says. “They’re not getting any skills training, they are not being taught about media literacy. They’re very well connected to the wired world, so they actually have strong opinions about things that are going on in their community. I just want to echo that and give those students the voice I wanted when I was in their shoes.”

Medina wants to change the way the district uses technology to teach students, who are so adept that they have evolved in the way they consume information and learn. That’s especially true with unfathomable volumes of information available at their fingertips.

“These students are past memorizing,” he says. “They’re at the point where they’re actually asking the questions why is it like this? And in that, they are doing their research and finding out why.”

In addition, he would like to offer teachers competitive salaries, which would help retain them and improve the quality of education for many students who say their classes are frequently taught by permanent substitutes.

“I’ve worked with big budgets, I’ve worked at big studios, I know how to run projects, I know how to take an idea and implement it,” Medina says. “And that is exactly what I’m going to bring to the table.”

https://pajaronian.com/medina-runs-for-pvusd-school-board/