Opening doors

The sun has barely risen, but Mike Hernandez is at his desk checking and sending emails. The glow from the computer screen on this late winter day is all that illuminates the room.

A 6 a.m. start is typical for Hernandez, principal of East High School, who is used to working 12-hour days. The early mornings give him time to collect his thoughts and prepare for the day.

While Hernandez carries himself with an inexplicable zen, he admits the job weighs on him. “We have 1,700 kids, that is some serious stress for any adult in this building. You are shaping — or attempting to shape — this large group. It’s crazy talk,” Hernandez exclaims. “How many people have that? It’s something we have to be very cognizant of.”

In partnership with more than 200 teachers and staff, Hernandez is on a mission to make East High School not just a great school, but a vital part of the community. In the two years since he arrived, Hernandez and his staff have connected with numerous community organizations, bringing their services directly into East, in hopes of engaging even the most vulnerable students and their families.

Last year the school opened a food pantry and a Summit Credit Union branch. Growing relationships with Briarpatch Youth Services, Nehemiah, Centro Hispano and Girls Inc. — to name a few — have brought extensive resources into the building to buoy the school’s increasingly diverse population.

“We’ve been able to establish relationships — whether American Family, Sector 67 or L’Etoile with Chef Tory Miller — anything we can do to be able to bring them to East has helped build that community,” Hernandez says. “Now these services are being offered here, supporting students in need.”

Tom Kanies has worked at East for 14 years; he’s currently the Freshman Academy coordinator. He credits Hernandez for nurturing a community.

“Mike threw out the idea to [the staff] about East becoming a community school in the sense that it becomes a hub where students and their families come to receive support services,” Kanies says. “Some parents come to school all the time, but when it comes to kids who are struggling, those parents aren’t here. Mike is out to engage the disengaged parents as well as the disengaged students and really understands that we’re not going to reach those kids until we reach their parents.”

When Hernandez transferred to East in 2015, after eight years as principal at Sherman Middle School, he had a keen awareness that many parents don’t feel welcome. 

“The community is changing,” says Kanies. “East was always part of the east side but we were kind of an island too. Mike is breaking down walls and really building ties to the community. I like the community at East more now than I probably ever have.”

It’s 8 a.m. and Hernandez is in position with 10th grade principal Alex Thompson. Standing outside of the cafeteria across from the senior wall, Hernandez becomes a greeter, bidding good morning to students as they sleepily make their way to class.

Hernandez sports an Under Armour warm-up jacket, blue jeans, and his East High ID lanyard — he nearly blends in with the students pouring by. A seemingly photographic memory allows him to rattle off nearly each name of all 1,700 students under his supervision.

“When do you guys start practice,” Hernandez asks one young man.

“Soon,” he replies. “You ready? You should know the date man!” Hernandez pushes.

“Brigit, did you get notice that we have advisory group today? At lunchtime okay? Be there!” Hernandez reminds her. “I will, don’t worry,” laughs senior Brigit Stattelman-Scanlan as she hustles to her first class.

Hernandez reaches out to another student who recently lost a grandparent, “Hey, how’s your mom and dad after the funeral?”

“They’re good…” the student responds before Hernandez jumps in, “They okay? I’ve got some pictures I want to send them from the game, I got some really nice ones, I’ll send them to you too, okay?” he says.

The effort doesn’t go unnoticed.

“Every day at passing time he stands in the hallway and he’ll shake students’ hands and call them over and ask them how they’re doing,” says Siara Williams, a sophomore. “He’s really involved in the students’ lives. He knows everyone in the school’s name, and he just makes everyone feel really welcome.”

It’s been a refreshing change for Kanies.

“He has that deep engagement with every student. We’ve been through five principals since I’ve been here and some of them have been very fine,” says Kanies. “But they don’t have that personal engagement with kids and it’s a really cool thing to see.”

The power of creating positive connections with students is not a novel concept, but it’s one that both Hernandez and his wife of 17 years, Melissa Hernandez, consider necessary for being a good educator.

Principal Hernandez calls Melissa, a third grade teacher at Elvehjem Elementary School, his biggest “thought partner.”

Melissa says the two push each other. “I think that my strength for him is that I’m pretty grounded and I’m in the classroom,” she says. “Administrators often lose touch with what’s happening in the classroom and that irks me a bit, so I just really try to make sure that he can see everything from a teacher’s perspective. We challenge each other, and I love it because we are both so much better because of it.”

Hernandez grew up in Toledo, Ohio. His father was a truck driver and his mother a librarian. After getting a bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green State University, he taught for a year in Toledo before moving to California.

He met his wife in San Bernardino, California. Hernandez was a middle school department chair for special education and Melissa taught third grade. It was there that Hernandez suddenly found himself thrust into an administrative role.

“It’s an odd story,” says Hernandez, shaking his head. “The day before school started, the principal and superintendent said they needed to speak to me. The previous night a principal at an elementary school was found intoxicated in his car at a Del Taco and was immediately fired.”

After shifting staff around, they named Hernandez interim assistant principal. “I said I didn’t want to do it and they said too bad,” says Hernandez. “I’ve been a principal for 15 years now.”

The Hernandez’ roots are in the Midwest. When they had their third and youngest child, the family moved to the Madison area to be closer to family. Although they love their jobs, family is a priority.

“My wife is extremely strong, she continues to remind me — not that I need to be reminded, but I do at times — that dad [comes] first, work second,” Hernandez says. “She understands that we have kids at East that don’t have positive adult role models, male adult role models, people of color adult role models, and while that’s always a stress, when I’m home, I’m home.”

Melissa says that her husband has a natural ability to connect with kids.

“He is what those kids need and that’s part of what makes him so good,” Melissa says. “He knows that he has to connect with them and I think that he really likes it. He really cares for them.”

When lunchtime rolls around Hernandez makes his way with pizza in hand to meet his principal’s advisory group, a set of students who consult with staff.

Today, the group chats about a student panel they participated in weeks prior. The students are candid. Accidental swear words slip past their lips as laughter spreads through the room.

Infinity Gamble, a senior and member of the group, participates because she knows that someone in power is listening.

“I’m talking directly to the source,” Gamble says after the meeting. “We don’t always agree on everything, but it’s in a respectful way. Mr. Hernandez listens to the pros and cons of how we, and the staff, feel and I like that. If we can’t get exactly what we want or what other people want, we can compromise and try to figure out what we can do in the sense of our school community.”

Gamble, who helped assemble the current group of students, says a goal was to represent East’s diversity.

According to the district, 63 percent of students at East identify as people of color. Fifty-six percent of East students are in low-income brackets — the highest among Madison’s four major public high schools.

“We thought a lot about how to make the group more diverse, how to get people from different socioeconomic statuses, genders and races,” says Gamble. “How do we make this look like our actual school? How do we get opinions from different backgrounds? After a lot of work, our group is a perfect representation of our school.”

Hernandez says he wants every student to feel valued and encouraged to lead — something he sees as necessary to the school’s success.

“School is a place of trust, it’s a place that values everybody’s opinion. We don’t always do what students ask,” Hernandez says. “However we hear it and we’re respectful. That’s the role that true schools that make a difference play. They are schools that value staff’s, students’, the community’s — everybody’s opinion,”

Sonia Spencer is a parent of sophomore twins at East who also had Hernandez as principal at Sherman. She feels welcome to offer her two cents.

“You don’t need to make an appointment with him, his door is always open,” Spencer says. “You don’t have to wait for that meeting time or that scheduled conference to see him. He has a sense of being there and letting families know, ‘I’m here, I’m the principal, my door is always open, and if I can’t help you, I’ll find somebody who can.’”

Spencer, who is African American, finds it refreshing to have a principal working to give students of color the same opportunities as their white peers.

“Mike is really great at noticing kids of color that are achieving and placing them in [advanced] programs or college prep programs,” Spencer says. “He’s a real, honest advocate making sure that kids of color, such as my kids, are able to get the same opportunities other kids are getting.”

Bridging the opportunity gap is one of the biggest challenges facing the district and the state. In 2015, 93 percent of white seniors in Wisconsin graduated high school, compared to 64 percent of black seniors, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction reports.

Kristen Nelson, a parent of two and a Big Sister to a young woman who recently graduated from East, says these dismal graduation rates aren’t due to a lack of dedicated teachers and programs, but because students of color don’t get help when they need it.

Her Little Sister struggled and almost didn’t graduate. But Hernandez threw her a lifeline.

“He talked to her, he learned her name. I don’t think until he got there that she connected with anyone,” Nelson says.

Hernandez introduced her Little Sister to Aronn Peterson, an advisor of the Black Student Union at East. Creating that connection made all the difference in the world, Nelson says. Her Little not only had someone to go to, she had someone to hold her accountable.

“It was close, she could have been one of those slip-through-the-cracks statistics, but he really helped her get through.”

Nelson admits that the problem is bigger than one person can take on, but she credits Hernandez with making inclusion a priority. 

“He’s very committed to building a school community,” says Nelson. “He doesn’t run a school, he runs a community.”

In the months since the election of Donald Trump, Hernandez and the staff at East have emphasized that sense of community, making clear to students and families that the school is a sanctuary.

“The day after the election was hard,” Hernandez says. “We have spent a tremendous amount of time after the election and after the inauguration — two very stressful times for students — reminding our community that we are here for the kids, all kids.”

During election week, students showed increased anxiety and had difficulty focusing. There was also a 2 percent drop in attendance.

“This drop was consistent among most demographic groups, but went down 3 percentage points among our ESL students,” Kanies says. “We seldom see this kind of drop in a week unless there’s some extreme weather involved. Attendance went back up a bit the next week, but not to the pre-election levels.”

Kanies remembers Hernandez’s emotional reaction to the election.

“He got on the PA and I thought he was going to break down and cry, not because of the politics of it but because of the implications for students in our building and the families in our community,” Kanies says.

Kanies doesn’t remember Hernandez’s exact words, but with the help of other staff, recalls his announcement as follows:

“I know a lot of you are coming to school today with some difficult emotions. I share a lot of these emotions with you. This is a challenging time. I want you to know that no matter what, we love all of you. We’re going to look after you. We’re going to take care of each other. That’s what East High is about.”

His stance was condemned by some. A person from the East community sent an anonymous letter to conservative radio personality Vicki McKenna. The letter was shared on McKenna’s radio show, website and Twitter, resulting in a number of phone calls and emails to Hernandez voicing disapproval.

“I let the kids know that they were safe here and then we began getting hate emails and hate phone calls on a daily basis,” says Hernandez. “I’ve never shied away from conflict. We’re going to continue doing this and we’re going to be outspoken about it because we want our kids and families to know that we have their backs.”

After the president signed an executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries and doubled-down on detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, East created multiple spaces where students and staff could speak openly about their fears. The school has also led a fundraiser for scholarships for undocumented students and brought in immigration lawyers to help families navigate the sea of paperwork to apply for citizenship.

Hernandez understands the fear many of his students face. His father was undocumented until just a few years ago.

“When we were little, ICE or INS would come through and even though I was born in the United States, we had to be concerned about that,” he says.

Despite the constant fear his family faced, Hernandez’s parents inspired their children to live successful lives. His sister, Sara Hernandez, is an associate dean at Cornell University. His brother is a police detective in San Diego.

He knows that for many immigrant students, the legal cloud their families live under can be an overwhelming stress.

“When we talk about our students that are undocumented, holy cow, they are just so much more limited,” says Hernandez. “With all of the [discussion] in the media of raids, it reminds me of leading through fear and intimidation. Then we expect the kids to come here, sit down and do trig? It’s just not a reality.”

As the school day draws to a close Hernandez reflects on the experiences and circumstances that led him to East. Being immersed in both the history and legacy of the school — established in 1922 — can be intimidating. He mentions Milton McPike, the former NFL football player who was a beloved East principal from 1979 until 2002.

“Every person that you talk to who remembers Mr. McPike says that he did everything he could for kids,” Hernandez says. “That’s the legacy I hope to leave, that no matter what, I was here for the kids.”

Williams says Hernandez is already establishing that legacy. “He really cares about his students and he’s really there to help us succeed,” she says. “He believes that we can rise to our potential and just because we might mess up one time, it doesn’t mean that he’s going to look at us differently. He’s one of those people that you know you can always go to.”

Hernandez insists that nothing he has accomplished since arriving at East would have been possible without his top-notch staff.

“There are some amazing teachers in this building, just amazing, and I wish everybody realized that these people put in a crazy amount of hours and sacrifice so much, but they choose to be here.”

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham appreciates that Hernandez’s leadership style is inclusive, not autocratic.

“Because he leads with a team of people, I expect great things,” says Cheatham. “I expect to see student outcomes continue to move in the right direction at East.”

In just two years, he’s making progress.

Between the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years, the percentage of students meeting ACT college readiness benchmarks increased in both reading and math. Students of color showed improvement across nearly all metrics — attendance, average semester one GPA, percent of 11th grade students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher, as well as a decrease in the percent of ninth graders failing two or more courses. And the graduation rate for all students increased by 2 percent.

While things are improving, Hernandez isn’t settling.

“We need to be better, we have a graduate rate that is embarrassing, it’s gone up, but it’s still embarrassing. If I’ve got three kids, at the current rate, I have to pick one of those that’s not going to graduate…. That’s the reality,” says Hernandez. “I’d like to see every kid graduate.”

Hernandez has many other goals: eliminate the opportunity gap, provide positive mirror models for all students of color, and ensure East is a safe and welcoming space, especially for its LGBTQ+, undocumented, transient and homeless students.

That won’t likely happen overnight, but Hernandez may have plenty of time to work on it.

“Honestly,” he says, “I hope to retire here.”