A former school administrator who worked with Superintendent Andrea Castañeda in Tulsa is coming to Salem with the goal of improving middle and high schools.
Danielle Neves will begin work in August as the Salem-Keizer School District’s deputy superintendent. She replaces former Deputy Superintendent Iton Udosenata, who was named superintendent of Tigard-Tualatin Schools in June.
In the role, she oversees secondary schools and the district’s equity office.
Neves’ son is starting sixth grade in the fall.
“This work is personal to me wherever I am because my child will also be a Salem-Keizer child,” Neves said in an interview. “I believe very strongly that we need to provide what’s good enough to our own kid to every single student.”
The Salem-Keizer School Board will vote Tuesday on a three-year contract for Neves. She will be paid $188,328 and receive a $3,500 relocation stipend.
Neves began her career in education as a teacher in Los Angeles. In 2004, she became a principal in Oakland and led multiple elementary and middle schools before joining Tulsa Public Schools in 2014.
In Tulsa, she worked in the district’s academics and curriculum office, where she led efforts to expand services for dual language programs and students learning English..
In 2022, she moved to a new role in Tulsa supervising high school principals. While she was there, she said several of Tulsa’s most challenged schools dramatically increased the share of students hitting their targets for the district’s math assessment.
Neves said Salem-Keizer has many things going well, including a robust dual language education program. She’d like to work on expanding those programs into career and technical education.
Her key targets include improving student scores in reading and math, and boosting attendance.
Districts around the country, including Salem-Keizer, have struggled to get students to come to class regularly since the return from online classes at the start of the Covid pandemic.
“We know that we’re not yet where we need to be with the level of performance so we’re going to want to focus on there,” Neves said. She said she plans to dive into how the district is working to improve and what goals are in place once she begins work.
As an administrator, Neves said it’s crucial for her to spend hours every week in schools and classrooms.
”I’m a teacher first, that’s who I am, that’s where my heart is,” she said. “I always want to be finding out what’s happening at the classroom level.”
Neves is the second hire Castañeda has made from Tulsa Public Schools. In June, the superintendent hired Jonathan McIlroy from Tulsa to be Salem-Keizer’s executive director of strategy and analytics. The title is a new one, but replaces the job done by former Director of Strategic Initiatives Suzanne West, who left Salem-Keizer this summer to become superintendent of the Forest Grove School District.
McIlroy will also be paid $188,328.
Castañeda worked personally with both in Tulsa, she said, though she did not supervise either.
Both executives were hired following a competitive recruitment process, and Castañeda hired Neves from among four candidates who were interviewed by a panel of district and school leaders, said Aaron Harada, school district spokesman. The superintendent acted on the panel’s hiring recommendation.
“I really believe in great talent. I’m recruiting all the time. Anyone who’s great, I want them to know that we’re great too, that there are some amazing things that are going to happen here and they want to be part of it,” Castañeda said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
