A tough Sacramento County school lost its beloved principal. The district won’t say why
Like other schools in northern Sacramento County’s Twin Rivers district, Oakdale Elementary has faced plenty of challenges for many years. The recent dismissal of a well-liked principal gave it a new and unexpected one — so much so that the students have staged walkouts and parents have joined them.
Kadhir Rajagopal, known as Dr. Raja, was unceremoniously removed as Oakdale’s principal for a district desk job in December and, more recently, put on paid leave. Why? Twin Rivers officials said they couldn’t comment on a personnel matter.
Parents, students, and Rajagopal himself say they feel betrayed by the district and bewildered by its public silence. They wonder why a popular principal — one so committed to an underperforming school that has seen seven top administrators in five years — would be removed.
“Are you telling me that these educated people with that much money can’t reform a school six blocks away from the district office?” Rajagopal asked. “If it was their goal to save Oakdale, that would have been done by now.”
Unless you’ve attended an “underachieving” school yourself, it’s hard to understand the situation of students who know no one is rooting for them.
My childhood elementary, junior high, and high schools all operate under the banner of the Twin Rivers district, which serves the children of Del Paso Heights, North Highlands, Foothill Farms, and surrounding communities.
Those communities — and the schools within them — have not changed much since I graduated in 2007. Students in the Twin Rivers Unified School District are among the poorest in Sacramento County. According to data provided by the district, 88.7% of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and 8.1% (about 2,100) are homeless.
Suspensions and expulsions are a way of life in the district. Twin Rivers ranked 11th statewide in suspensions of Black boys in 2016-17, according to one study.
Many students come from challenging homes. Gang violence, in my experience, was a constant threat. Pregnancy, truancy, and drug use were also common.
Our teachers fought every day to keep us in school. If we were lucky, our parents fought, too. We had hope, a chance at an education, and very little else.
But my pride in our community, accomplishments, and potential never wavered. I see such pride now in the protesting parents and students of Oakdale who are fighting to save their school.
A ‘promotion’
Oakdale’s former principal believes he may have been removed for allowing volunteers to watch students during recess and between classes before their background checks were completed.
Rajagopal had recruited 10 adult mentors from the community to work with students at the K-8 school in North Highlands. If there was a fight, a mentor would be there. If there was a problem at home, the student could talk to a mentor about it. If grades were slipping, a mentor would get involved.
He believes the program had already begun to help even in the short time between the beginning of the school year in September and his removal in December. “There were almost no fights for a month and a half,” Rajagopal said. “It was a different school.”
In October, before the mentors’ background checks had been completed and their district badges printed, Rajagopal asked some of them to fill in on “yard duty” — keeping the peace during recess and passing periods — because the school was short on teachers to handle the task. Rajagopal said it wasn’t uncommon to use un-badged workers as long as they were in the clearance process, and he believes the mentors were just days away from receiving the final go-ahead from the district.
According to the former principal, a staff member from Twin Rivers’ administration visited the school and asked the mentors to leave campus until they had proper identification. Rajagopal. told me the district subsequently withdrew funding for the mentor program and, the day before students went on winter break, sidelined him.
To make matters worse, parents told me that administrators described his removal as a promotion when they questioned why their principal was gone. Rajagopal. said he was given the new title of “principal, special projects.” In reality, Rajagopal said, he was riding a desk, watching YouTube videos about successful school mentor programs, and occasionally substituting for teachers who were out with COVID. Then, he said, the district put him on paid leave.
The mentor program had been supported by hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Sierra Health Foundation, My Brother’s Keeper, Sutter Health, and the Center for Fathers and Families, he said. Chet Hewitt, who heads the Sierra Health Foundation, said his organization reached out to the district with questions after Rajagopal’s removal.
“We had faith in Dr. Raja’s ability to carry the program forward,” Hewitt said. “We wanted to know why there was a leadership change.”
Hewitt said he received the same non-answer I got from the district: It’s a personnel matter that can’t be discussed. However, he confirmed that no one was planning to pull the grant and that he and the foundation support those protesting the dismissal.
“The idea of mentors for children, given all of the challenges they’ve suffered over the pandemic ... that level of support is important,” Hewitt said. While the adults figure out their issues, he added, “we’re not going to abandon the children.”
Students, parents protest
Several students said that under Rajagopal, Oakdale Elementary was finally becoming a place where they felt comfortable.
“Why would you take the person who’s making the school a better place?” said Ja’meirr Parley, 11.
“(Rajagopal) is a very good principal,” said Bryan Arreola, 11. “We want him back.”
“He was a very positive person,” said Caliyah Littlejohn, a sixth-grader at Oakdale. “They just randomly took him.”
On Feb. 16, Ja’meirr, Bryan, Caliyah and about 60 of their schoolmates walked out of class for the second time this month to protest Rajagopal’s removal. Students outside the gates reported that the mentors the former principal had hired were now being used to try to keep them from leaving their classrooms.
During the walkout, students pointed the mentors out to me and they could be seen milling inside school gates, wearing bright orange vests, and looking uneasy at the growing crowd of protesters outside. District security officials showed up in both marked and unmarked cars to monitor the crowd, which included students as young as 5.
A letter to parents said the district had learned of the walkout “in support of a former Oakdale principal who was reassigned to the district office,” and that while the district supports students’ First Amendment rights, it strongly encourages them to exercise them after school. “Students leaving campus during the instructional day will be directed back to the classrooms,” the letter said.
Some students said they felt physically intimidated by the adults blocking the doors. Others reported their protest signs being ripped up and thrown away. Many said others were scared to join the demonstration, having been told they could “get in trouble” for it. After the first walkout, at least two teachers were fired for supporting the students. One was told to pack up his desk in front of his traumatized class.
Maria Grigalva, a relative of an Oakdale student, said she believes the administration removed Rajagopal because he was “breaking down the school-to-prison pipeline.”
“What they did was retaliatory,” Grigalva said.
Ramona Landeros, a former Twin Rivers trustee, a guardian of a child at Oakdale, and one of the protest organizers, was helping to keep the school children out of the street during the protest. She told them to remember their right to speak out.
“Just because we live in a neighborhood where there is a lot of poverty,” she added, “doesn’t mean we have to have bad administrators.”
This story was corrected to reflect the fact that Oakdale Elementary is in North Highlands.
This story was originally published February 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
