Modesto schools superintendent shares her cancer fight with staff, student families
Shortly after accepting the offer from Modesto City Schools to be its new district superintendent, Sara Noguchi learned she had breast cancer.
In some ways, she was prepared to one day get such news. Her family — including her mother, grandmother and sister — has a “big history” of breast cancer, Noguchi said Tuesday. “It’s part of who we are.”
And so she’s been good about getting an annual mammogram, usually during the holiday season of late November into December. But having taken the Modesto job, the former associate superintendent at Twin Rivers Unified School District in the Sacramento area knew she’d be busy once the school year started.
She had the mammogram done early, at the Kaiser medical center in Modesto, and was “shocked” when it revealed a tumor.
This week, because transparency is essential to build trusting relationships, she said, Noguchi shared her bad news in a letter she sent to district staff and a nearly identical one she posted on the district website for parents.
“While it was a difficult personal decision to let all the employees know of my health issue, I know that it is the best thing if I want to be an effective leader for Modesto City Schools,” Noguchi told The Bee.
She admitted that her first reaction to the news was to hide it from all but a select few. She figured she’s a strong person who could get through it without many people needing to know. But then she thought, “People will see that I lose 10 pounds, this wig will come off and I’ll have only an inch of hair.”
She thoroughly thought it through, she said, and “filled with anxiety even as I was doing it,” she wrote the letter. Because being forthright about something that could even slightly affect her position as superintendent, Noguchi said, is important to making Modesto City Schools “the best district it can be and making it a destination for people to work in and send their kids to school.”
In the letter, the superintendent said she has been buoyed by friends, family, doctors and her new bosses — the district Board of Education members — who’ve joined “Team Sara” to support her in beating the disease.
Noguchi said a lumpectomy removed the tumor, meaning she no longer has cancer. But, doctors told her, if she pursued treatment, her recurrence rate over a 10-year period would be just 5 percent. So she began chemotherapy early this month. “After this week, I am halfway done,” Noguchi said. “Never easy, but I’m not scared anymore. I have learned that there are bigger issues to worry about.”
The days that follow chemo are tough, the superintendent said. In her letter, she wrote, “My doctors advise me that I likely will miss very little work. However, in order to make sure that any absences will not delay district progress, I asked Marla Mack, associate superintendent of education services, to serve as acting superintendent if I need to miss a workday.”
Looking at silver linings, Noguchi said she’s lucky she had her annual mammogram done early and the cancer was caught in stage one. And she’s glad her daughter, a nursing student, got the eye-opener.
“She was there when I heard I have the gene, which means she has a 50 percent chance” of developing cancer, the superintendent said. “She talked with a genetic counselor about what that means for a woman 20 years old. She now will be put in the high-risk category, and how they monitor her health will be much different than otherwise. Information is power.”
This story was originally published August 21, 2018 at 3:37 PM.