Yuri Calderon Wants Penn Valley's Vision Written by the Community, Not His Office

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Yuri Calderon can describe public education from inside a classroom, a law office, a district business office, and a statewide association. Asked which of those experiences most shaped how he is approaching his new district, he named none of them first.

"Among the lessons I have learned, one of the important ones is good leadership starts with listening," he wrote in answers to The CAEdTribune.

The list still matters to the argument. "My career has allowed me to see public education from a variety of perspectives, including the classroom, law, school finance, administration, advocacy, and statewide leadership," he wrote. He said lasting improvement does not come from chasing the latest program. "It comes from understanding a community, staff and students and building trust, using resources wisely, and keeping decisions focused on what will make a meaningful difference for students."

Calderon became superintendent of Penn Valley Union Elementary^↗ in Nevada County on July 1. The board appointed him in May, and he succeeds Melissa Conley, who retired. He came from Orange Unified School District, where he was interim assistant superintendent of business services, and before that he served as chief business official in several California districts, as executive director of the Small School Districts' Association, and as legal counsel to education organizations. He wrote in August that the start had been a whirlwind.

The district he now runs is small, and slightly smaller than it was. Penn Valley reported 530 students in 2025-26, the most recent school year in California's published files, across everything it answers for, 493 of them in district-operated schools and 37 in a charter school the district authorizes. His own first year, 2026-27, will not appear in the state data until the next collection lands, and those counts will differ. Two school years earlier the district-operated count was 521. Those 28 students are 5.4 percent of the schools Calderon directly oversees, and in a district this size that is closer to a staffing decision than a rounding error.

The chart shows three nearly flat lines: the authorizer total and the district-operated count both drifting down across the three published years, and the charter count moving only between 33 and 37 students.

The word "elementary" in the district's name is doing real work. Penn Valley's district-operated schools run from transitional kindergarten through grade 8, and the charter it authorizes accounts for the district's only enrollment in grades 9 through 12.

In the chart, the tall bars from transitional kindergarten through grade 8 are almost entirely district-operated, and grades 9 through 12 appear only as small charter bars at the right edge.

Half of the students in that structure are counted as economically disadvantaged. In 2025-26, 271 of Penn Valley's 530 students carried that classification, or 51.1 percent. Another 86 students, 16.2 percent, received special education services. Eleven students, 2.1 percent, were identified as experiencing homelessness, seven students, 1.3 percent, were English learners, and three students, 0.6 percent, were in foster care. These groups overlap with one another, so the shares cannot be added together.

The bars in the chart are sorted from the largest group down, and the economic disadvantage bar is more than three times the length of the next one.

By race and ethnicity, the published 2025-26 categories were 378 white students, 71.3 percent, 84 Hispanic students, 15.8 percent, and 44 multiracial students, 8.3 percent. Each of the five remaining published categories accounts for less than 2 percent of enrollment. Nothing is withheld here: the published categories cover 100 percent of the district's students, so these shares are exact rather than lower bounds.

What Calderon says he wants to do first is find out what that community wants. The district has begun a vision process it calls Roots, River, Horizons, described in materials the district prepared this summer.

"I want to understand what the community believes is special about Penn Valley, where they believe we need to grow, and what they want this District to become," Calderon wrote. "My hope is that the Roots River Horizon process will give us a genuinely community-developed vision for the future rather than one imposed from the Superintendent's Office."

That is a specific commitment, and an unusual one to put in writing. A superintendent who says the vision should not come from his office has given the community a standard to measure him by later.

The most concrete idea already on the table is a farm and agricultural technology program at Ready Springs, sketched in a district newsletter published this summer with a greenhouse, raised beds, and space for animals. Calderon was careful about how he wants it to arrive.

"Learning needs to be real. It also needs to develop organically," he wrote. "My hope is that the community, staff and students will help develop an agriculture program that is connected to the Penn Valley roots but also provides an incredible opportunity to connect science, technology, engineering, math, environmental stewardship, business, and the arts. I want to see students planting, designing, building, experimenting, solving problems and developing solutions and translating that learning into a direct connection or benefit in our community."

The state test record shows where that ambition would land. In spring 2025, 49.5 percent of Penn Valley students met or exceeded the state English language arts standard and 38.2 percent met or exceeded the math standard. Ten years earlier those shares were 37 percent and 35 percent. English language arts has moved 12.5 percentage points across that decade. Math has moved 3.2.

The chart shows both subjects rising to a 2018 peak, easing off, then breaking at 2020, when no statewide test was given, before a partial recovery that carried English language arts to 53.5 percent in 2024 and left math at 38.2 percent in 2025. The results file records what students scored, not why the two subjects moved so differently.

The budget is the part of this job Calderon has spent the most years inside. The state's current expense of education file puts Penn Valley's 2024-25 spending at $7,970,961, or about $17,634 per pupil. That per-pupil figure divides by average daily attendance of 452.03, not by the 493 students on the district-operated rolls.

The gap between those two numbers has a companion in the attendance file. In 2024-25, 149 of 528 eligible district-operated students were chronically absent, 28.2 percent, or more than one student in four. The rate was 27.3 percent in 2021-22, rose to 35.8 percent in 2022-23, fell to 24.8 percent in 2023-24, and came back up to 28.2 percent. Across the full span it is up 0.9 percentage points, which is to say it has churned and ended close to where it began. The attendance files do not explain the movement.

The chart makes the churn visible: a peak in 2022-23, a drop the following year that gave back most of it, and a 2024-25 point sitting almost exactly on the 2021-22 one.

So Calderon inherits a district with a legible record and an open question. Enrollment is easing down, half of the students are economically disadvantaged, English results sit well above where they were a decade ago, math sits close to where it started, and more than one child in four misses enough school to be counted chronically absent. He has said the answer should not be a program he brings with him. Whether the listening produces one the community owns is the thing to watch first.

Enrollment, student-group, assessment, chronic absence, and current expense figures come from the California Department of Education for the years noted. Yuri Calderon's quotations are from his written answers to The CAEdTribune in August 2026. His appointment, start date, predecessor, and previous roles come from the district's announcement, the California Department of Education school directory, and the district staff directory. The Roots, River, Horizons vision process and the Ready Springs farm and agricultural technology concept are described in district materials.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Penn Valley Union Elementary - EdTribune CA - California Education Data

Yuri Calderon Wants Penn Valley's Vision Written by the Community, Not His Office