Year in Review: In conversation with MCS superintendent Vanessa Buitrago
Successes and challenges went hand in hand during her first year as Modesto City Schools superintendent, Vanessa Buitrago told The Bee during a broad-ranging interview.
While labor negotiations have been a challenge, the accompanying success has been the relationship she’s built with the Modesto Teachers Association, she said.
“I value that relationship a lot and I enjoy working with them and I think that matters. I think that we have really productive conversations and our discussions really inspire me, and they keep me motivated. So, I think in that way it is a success,” Buitrago said.
The Modesto City Schools Board of Education appointed Buitrago as superintendent in May 2025 in a 5-2 vote. Some community members initially expressed concerns over Buitrago’s experience coming into the role. When she joined, the district was facing an upcoming round of labor negotiations and concerns over certain student outcomes like completion rates of A-G classes before graduation. A-G classes are required to be completed for UC and CSU college admissions.
On these topics and more, Buitrago reflected on her first year as superintendent in an interview with The Modesto Bee.
Another simultaneous challenge and success was student outcomes, the superintendent said. While student literacy rates, high school math grades, CAASPP science scores, A-G class completion rates and graduation rates are increasing, math performance overall remains low in all grade levels and A-G completion rates could still be higher, Buitrago said.
She added that certain demographics of students are not seeing the same outcomes as others. “For example, our students with special needs who are in special education, we do not see that they’re making progress at the same rate as other students. The same is the case for our English learners, and the same is the case for our African American students, and so we know that there are still pockets of work that really need a lot of attention,” Buitrago said.
Preliminary numbers show that A-G completion rates are trending upward with the class of 2026, district spokesperson Linda Mumma Solorio said, though exact numbers on student outcomes won’t be available till the end of June.
District labor negotiations
The school year began with labor negotiations that remain ongoing with the Modesto Teachers Association. From a proposed restructuring of the elementary school day to healthcare contributions, several sticking points emerged during the 2025-26 school year.
“I think that negotiations are always influenced by history and, in particular, historic relationships and dynamics,” Buitrago said. “Along with that, I would say that expectations and trust are all sort of built into that. So one of the challenges coming into negotiations is that I wasn’t fully aware of what the complete history was as it pertains to the relationship between CSEA and the district, or MTA and the district,”
Most recently, Buitrago wrote a letter to several statewide education organizations and lawmakers asking to look into statewide healthcare insurance pooling for educators, describing rising healthcare costs for districts and teachers as unsustainable.
“When that letter went out, right, we shared it with different media outlets, we shared it with different lawmakers, and also educational leaders,” Buitrago said. “What I’m particularly pleased by, and I’m honored by, is that a lot of our teachers have seen the letter and have acknowledged the effort that I’m making to really make a difference in their lives, and it’s not to say that that letter is going to definitively create change, but my hope is that it will draw some attention, needed attention, to the issue.”
On May 27, she was notified of her selection to State Superintendent Tony Thurmond’s statewide TK–12 healthcare cost workgroup focused on this issue with 14 others.
MCS passes cellphone ban
In response to state legislation requiring districts to restrict cell phone use on campus, Buitrago and the Board of Education passed a policy that bans the use of cell phones during the whole school day and impacts all grade levels.
The move contradicted the results of community surveys the district put out to students, parents and staff which showed the majority in favor of a partial ban. During a previous board of education meeting, Buitrago said that while she values the community’s input, its opinions are one among many factors considered by her and the board.
“When the board or district staff go against a community recommendation, it isn’t because we’re saying that we don’t value the input or sometimes that we don’t agree with the input. We do believe that community input is important and valuable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will always make decisions based purely on community input,” Buitrago said at the March 30 board meeting.
MCS sees fiscal and academic successes
Two successes seen this past school year — MCS’s financial solvency and rising literacy rates among grade-schoolers — are thanks to the work of her predecessor, Sara Noguchi, Buitrago said.
While districts of similar size in surrounding counties had layoffs in the hundreds, MCS ultimately laid off only one person this school year. Buitrago also recognized the Board of Trustees and the district’s financial staff for their contributions to Modesto City Schools’ financial health.
And the elementary district was recently recognized in an article by the L.A. Times for consistently producing increases in math and reading scores.
Employees fired, departed over sex charges
Since January, two paraprofessionals and one principal in the district have been fired or departed due to charges related to sex with minors. Asked what she might say to parents concerned about recent arrests, Buitrago said, “It isn’t just a concern that parents have, it’s a shared concern that I think everyone working in the school system, or everyone working with young people, actually should be alarmed by.”
There might be more opportunities to educate students about reporting behaviors or rumors that may indicate inappropriate behaviors from adults, she added.
“We talk a lot with our adults about reporting requirements, and we talk a lot about being mindful of things that happen throughout the school day, but we also need to leverage our students, because peers also know things,” Buitrago said. “And I think it’s just critical to also encourage our students to report things when they’re not right.”
Developing the local workforce with education
During this past school year, the district began working on a pilot program with Stanislaus State University for students interested in becoming teachers. They can take dual-enrollment courses at the university while still in high school, receive automatic admission and then return to the district to teach. The district is exploring creating similar programs for students interested in healthcare.
“I don’t know any area in the state that has been able to keep up with the demand (for teachers), and so I think that there’s no better way to meet that demand than to really leverage the students that we have and inspire them to be educators,” Buitrago said.
The program would require high school juniors to take dual-enrollment courses that would go toward a bachelor’s degree in an education-related field. If they complete two years at Modesto Junior College and two years at Stanislaus State with the required classes, they’d graduate with their teaching credential and be placed in Modesto City Schools.
“What I’m hearing from students and their families is students are kind of afraid to go to higher education institutions because they don’t want to invest all that time and money, and then not have a job. I mean, that is a real concern,” she said. “We have many families who are very nervous about their students going off to college and leaving home. That’s also a very common and real concern, and so I think by building a pathway like the one I just described, we’re addressing both of those things.”
New MCS bond measure on the ballot
At the June 8 Board of Education meeting, trustees unanimously approved putting a bond measure before voters that would authorize the district to borrow up to $250 million. The cost to district residents is “estimated to be $29 per $100,000 of assessed valuation, first occurring in fiscal year 2031-32.” So a homeowner with a house valued at $500,000 would pay an additional $145 in property tax.
The district’s bond measure would be its fifth since 2018. MCS passed Measures D and E in 2018 for elementary schools and junior highs, Measure L in 2022 for its high school district and Measure X in 2024 for its elementary schools and junior highs.
According to spokesperson Solorio, the district plans to structure the bonds so that the current property tax rate remains the same. Because its 2002 bonds are now paid off, taxpayers might see property tax decreases of about $22 annually.
Buitrago said some of the older high schools like Downey and Davis high schools have dilapidated buildings and bathrooms in poor condition, “and that has to get addressed, because at the end of the day, that’s an equity issue.”
“I think that it is absolutely inequitable for some of our students in our district to have access to beautiful bathrooms and beautiful hallways, state-of-the-art facilities, while other students in a different part of town don’t,” Buitrago said. “When community members say, ‘Well, but you already had all the previous bond money, why do you need another one?’ Well, it’s because we have 34 schools, and many of them are very, very old.”
As for the upcoming school year, Buitrago said her priorities will be alignment and the culture of the MCS workforce and student body. The goal with alignment would be to ensure that districtwide education, its Be the Change Campaign and Map Your Mission initiative would complement each other.
Map your Mission aims to expose kids to a variety of careers and help them map how to get there, while Be the Change aims to motivate students to participate to enact the improvements they wish to see in their communities.
“I’m just really grateful for the community and the way that they embraced me when I came in, even though I grew up in Modesto and went through the school system, I had never worked in Modesto City Schools, and I’d been gone for 25 years,” Buitrago said.
“I am so thankful for everyone who has helped me get to a place in a matter of a year where I can say I really understand the system, and I understand where we need to go, and I don’t think that I would have been able to get to that place without all the help that I have received.”
