At 8 years old, his whole life changed, recalls Jeffrey Thomas, Career and Technical Education Operations Specialist at the San Diego Unified School District. During the teachers’ strike of 1977, he and his classmates were sent off on a bus to see Star Wars. When Jeffrey saw that first spaceship fly overhead, he decided to learn all he could about media—and he was transformed forever.
“It was such a primal story of good and evil,” he says. “Modern myths. I’m very big on diversity, and it comes right from Star Wars: ‘The galaxy was so diverse, and that’s what made it interesting.’”
He started going to Comic-Con in San Diego “before it was cool” and learned all he could about comic books and multi-genre entertainment. Today, Comic-Con is so popular that it is impossible to get hotel rooms in San Diego in summer—even for AFSA, whose leaders have long hoped to hold a conference there. Jeffrey is a highly active member of AFSA San Diego Local 134.
At Tierrasanta Elementary School, Jeffrey was mentored by Catie Somers, a media and library teacher, who taught him about video production. In 1979, with the school’s video camera, he and his best friend Matt Alexander created a news show for their school. He continued his video production studies while attending Junípero Serra High School.
While majoring in filmmaking at San Diego State University, Jeffrey was part of a small group of students who made a feature-length, 35-millimeter film called In the Beginning, a parody of the old Cecil B. DeMille movies, about a boy who falls asleep in a church and starts daydreaming his own reality.
All the traveling to L.A. burned him out, and he discovered he didn’t want to live there. Gradually, he turned to education. His mother, grandfather, and other relatives were educators at various levels, and Catie Somers already had him working with kids as a video instruction consultant. She later helped him become a video production consultant at DePortola Middle School, where he literally learned on the job.
“Things just fell into place,” he says. “I fell in love with working with the kids. They were re-energizing.”
Next, Catie convinced him to go to Kearny High School as a media production specialist. At first, his responsibilities consisted mainly of moving TVs around, but he quickly grew bored and transitioned into the role of technology coordinator for the school. Thus, he entered the world of educational technology, where he learned how technology could be used to transform education.
He also became a WebQuest instructor at the Teach the Teachers Collaborative in Ojai, a web tech instructor at a teachers’ collaborative in Ojai, an ed tech instructor at San Diego State, and a presenter at conferences across the state. He had embarked on a career as an education administrator by default—but he liked it.
In 2003, he was appointed school site operations specialist, a brand-new position in the district, at his alma mater, Junípero Serra High School. He became the administrator in charge of operations such as scheduling and attendance. “I liked it, but being the first person in a new role, I was a bit of an outsider.”
Compiling testing data over the years helped Jeffrey see a pattern in which the needs of certain low-income students were overlooked. As Master Schedule Coordinator, he could redesign the course request collection and input process, transforming the site from an adult-centered master schedule to a student-centered, equity-based master schedule. “You get to ask yourself where you’re putting your resources and why.”
A deeper equity awareness came from meeting Maya Enrique, mother of two daughters, whose family has deep ties in San Diego’s Chicano community. Their meeting was fortuitous. “We’ve been together for 12 years,” he says. He’s quick to add that he proposed to her during one of their annual weeklong pilgrimages to New York, while boating on the lake in Central Park. He was a nervous wreck, hiding the ring in his pocket, afraid she would discover it. She said yes, and today her daughters, Sophia and Marisol, are also his.
In 2017, a budget crisis forced a move to the District’s Office of Secondary Schools, where he got a chance to see how things worked from a district level. Two years later, he moved to SDUSD’s Career and Technical Education (CCTE) Office to overhaul their College Credit by Exam process. The CCTE Pathways Programs include rigorous academics, work-based learning experiences, and other student supports.
“We’ve grown the program by many thousands since 2019, and it may sound funny, but I compare it to donating blood platelets,” he says. In a three-year period, he lost his mother, aunt, and uncle to cancer and has donated platelets to help cancer patients every two to three weeks ever since.
“I may help save some of those patients, but I never meet them,” he says. “And in my work, I help about 20,000 kids, but I’ll never meet them. It’s kind of cool. It’s gratifying to help from a distance.”
Through Maya, he is now the grandfather of two little boys. He realizes they might never have the full advantages of other students simply because their skin is darker. He is hyper-aware that there are other students in his district just like his grandsons. He wants to do whatever he can “to help remove the systemic inequities to make a better future for our students.” He’s proud to be part of a district that cares about equity.
Jeffrey and Maya are dedicated to the same ideals and also share some of the same interests. Like him, she is a movie fan, and both love theater. They’ve recently enjoyed the movies Sinners and Superman. During this year’s New York Broadway retreat, they saw one or two shows a day, including Maybe Happy Ending and Real Women Have Curves, both of which focus on diversity. “This year we saw only plays that would uplift and bring joy,” he says.
