At the April 26 Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Jennifer Hawn announced the Board’s selection of David Yoshihara as principal of PHS. According to Hawn’s newsletter, The Piedmont Pulse, Yoshihara underwent an intensive interview process with multiple rounds of interviews, background checks, and references.
Yoshihara’s appointment comes after current principal Sukanya Goswami announced her resignation in pursuit of a doctorate in Educational Leadership, according to her school-wide email. Yoshihara, who has been in public education for nearly 30 years, has served in a wide variety of schools and positions, including at “districts very similar to PUSD in high achievement”, according to the Pulse. His interview process involved Hawn observing his interactions with students at his current school, Frick United Academy of Language.
Yoshihara wasn’t always set on the path of education. While earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering at UC Berkeley, a class during his senior year took him in a different direction.
“I ended up taking a field studies class at King Middle School in Berkeley. I was up in the middle of everything, they put me in a classroom, I was working with the teacher, I was working with kids. It wasn’t necessarily an epiphany but it was a different moment. I ended up pursuing education, which I’ve been in since then,” Yoshihara said.
When asked about his ideal standard of conduct and communication between faculty and administration, Yoshihara stressed the importance of active listening.
“I’m a consensus model kind of person, I know you can’t always reach consensus but ideally you’d like to be able to hear divergent ideas and get back to the listening piece. Then you get to a model where you’re democratic but also consensus model oriented,” Yoshihara said.
One of Yoshihara’s main goals at Tamalpais Union High School District where he served as superintendent was to implement a fully functioning wellness center at each of the district’s three high schools to support students afflicted by academic and extracurricular stress. Yoshihara said this emphasis on mental and emotional support is something that he wishes to bring to Piedmont.
“The wellness center was a place for students to go for any reason. It was designed to create a space that was less intense than outside,” Yoshihara said.
Something Yoshihara said he hopes will happen at Piedmont is that students will take responsibility for the physical environment.
“It’s true that saying that the judge of one’s character is what they do when nobody’s watching. Are you one who’s going to pick up trash? Are you one who’s going to call something out that isn’t right? For me it’s about building that culture that this campus is as much mine as it is yours or anyone else’s.”
Yoshihara said PHS’s size and importance as an institution in the community was something that stood out to him.
“On a Friday night [at Patterson High School] everyone was there, the whole community. I’m sensing there are certain events in the [Piedmont] community that bring everybody together. It gives it that small town, collegiate feel to it,” Yoshihara said. “The community and the school are almost one and the same.”
Outside of work, Yoshihara enjoys the outdoors, reading, and musical theater. His current favorite musical is “& Juliet”. He is a father of four, a self described foodie, and a California native, although he was born in Vietnam.
As principal of PHS, Yoshihara wants to build a relationship with the student body. To achieve this he wants to get regular facetime with students and be a face of the community that they can look up to.
“On a daily basis, it’s the visibility factor of site leadership that I think is important, and understanding the student’s story. The better you understand your student body, the more leverage you have when you reach tough decisions later down the road,” Yoshihara said.
