When Joseph Di Salvo heard about the vacant position at Brownell
Middle School, he immediately logged onto the Internet to check out
the district. The San Jose native liked what he saw.
Gilroy – When Joseph Di Salvo heard about the vacant position at Brownell Middle School, he immediately logged onto the Internet to check out the district. The San Jose native liked what he saw.
“When I looked up the Web site I saw bold goals,” he said.
Di Salvo applied for the job and Friday district officials announced that he will fill the principal position left vacant when Suzanne Dam retires next month. The board will officially approve the hiring, contract and salary at its June 1 meeting.
With more than 32 years of experience in public education, Di Salvo spent 18 years as an administrator and 12 as a middle school principal. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s from San Jose State University.
Most recently, the 54-year-old served as principal at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School. Before landing the job at the Palo Alto-based school, Di Salvo spent six years as principal at a middle school in Milpitas. The Jane Lathrop position not only bumped up his salary considerably – from $106,000 to $134,800 – but it also gave him the chance to leave behind a superintendent he’d clashed with in the past.
Unfortunately, for Di Salvo, that same woman ended up as chief of the Palo Alto Unified School District right around the same time he settled into place.
“It was a power struggle,” he said.
The two butted heads once again. The superintendent wanted to get rid of a teacher Di Salvo wanted to keep and so on.
“We saw eye to eye about children and education but our styles were very, very different,” Di Salvo. “We didn’t agree about certain procedural matters.”
Because Di Salvo, still had one year left on his contract, he and the district settled on a deal wherein he serves as “principal, special assignment.” The position has limited duties and ends on June 30. He will slip into the Brownell principalship one day later.
Despite the reassignment, a stack of letters from teachers, Palo Alto board members, and district officials, highly recommended Di Salvo and described him as a valuable asset to any school district.
“It is no wonder Mr. Di Salvo is popular with parents and students since his concern and compassion for them go beyond the job description and enriches the social climate of the school and community alike,” wrote Mary Simpson, a orchestra/music teacher at Jane Lathrop and Terman middle schools.
“I believe Di Salvo would be a valuable asset to any school district fortunate enough to include him among their administrative ranks.”
Di Salvo said he was attracted to Brownell because unlike Palo Alto, where standardized test scores are high, Gilroy struggles. Only one school has achieved the statewide goal of 800 or more on the Academic Performance Index and the number of English language learners is significant.
“I began a lot of my early (career) working with the kind of issues Gilroy is grappling with,” he said.
Di Salvo spent 10 years teaching at-risk youth for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. His very first teaching job was at a juvenile hall high school.
But Di Salvo isn’t simply concerned about the at-risk students.
“We need to meet the needs of everyone … low performing to gifted to English learners.”
In this age of standardized tests, the needs of gifted children are often shoved aside, he said. Teachers need to differentiate between gifted, average and needy students and find a way to ensure all of them are receiving a good education.
Di Salvo has been married for 33 years. The couple met at a mixer when Di Salvo attended Bellarmine College Preparatory and his wife was a student at Notre Dame High School, both in San Jose.
The couple have a 24-year-old son, who recently graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles.
