West Valley high school district superintendent to resign amid rising tensions

Bill Sanderson, superintendent of the Los Gatos Saratoga Union High School District, will be on leave for the rest of the school year and will resign as of next June after some community members were on the verge of calling for his resignation.

Sanderson will be on leave for “personal reasons,” according to a message from Misty Davies, president of the district’s board of trustees, sent on Oct. 22. The board appointed Heath Rocha, assistant superintendent of student services, to serve as interim superintendent for the rest of the school year, Davies said in the email.

“Bill W. Sanderson has served as our superintendent since July 2022, and the board of trustees thanks him for all he has accomplished during this time,” the email reads.

Tensions between Sanderson and teachers, students and parents had been building in recent months. Parents and teachers said that Sanderson’s tenure has been marked by a new style of “top-down” leadership, and they felt that he didn’t make enough of an effort to include members of the community in his decision making.

Sanderson told this news organization earlier this month that he saw the community members’ complaints as isolated to Saratoga High School, and encouraged them to get involved with the community groups he works with, like the superintendent’s parent advisory committee.

The announcement of Sanderson’s departure comes suddenly, after the district’s board of trustees voted to renew Sanderson’s contract in September. The contract renewal left some teachers in the district unhappy, since it included the same 8% raise that the District Teachers Association secured after months of negotiations. The trustees, who eventually unanimously approved the renewal of his contract, defended Sanderson’s performance at the September meeting.

The announcement also comes just over a week after Sanderson appeared before community members, along with trustees Misty Davies and Katherine Tseng, at a town hall meeting that the district held at Saratoga High School on Oct. 14. The meeting, an effort to reconcile recent conflicts with an “open two-way conversation,” was attended by over 100 parents and students.

The district had scheduled another town hall meeting to take place on Oct. 22 at 6 p.m., just hours after the announcement of Sanderson’s resignation. Though it was originally planned to take place as a town hall with Sanderson and a minority of the board of trustees in attendance, it has since been classified as a “special board meeting,” with four of the five trustees set to attend.