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Hilda Maldonado was appointed to be the new superintendent of the Santa Barbara Unified School District in May and will officially take the reins July 1. Though she is coming from her position as the associate superintendent of leadership and partnerships in the Los Angeles Unified School District, her path to superintendency began much earlier.
She moved to the United States when she was 11 from a small town in Jalisco, Mexico, where her family had a dairy farm. Her parents were not able to attend school after the 2nd grade, but they were determined their children would receive education. They left the farm to work in factories in the United States so that Maldonado and her brothers could attend school full-time. Once the young girl learned English, she began to thrive.