Priya Sembi, the principal at Michelle Obama Elementary School in Richmond, believes that reading is a civil right. Not as an abstract idea or a high-minded slogan.
Rather, it’s a belief she lives by, born from her experience as a young person who started school as an English Language Learner and now as a leader of a school where most of the students are Black and Latino and economically disadvantaged.
Her first school as a child was in the West Contra Costa Unified School District and she spent part of her childhood in Richmond. She returned to the city as a teacher, and has now come full circle as a principal of a school where, according to the most recent data, student test scores in reading are improving across the board.
“If kids are walking away from a school not learning how to read, we are just playing into white supremacy culture characteristics,” she said. “We are playing into racialized injustice over and over again.”
How Childhood Shaped Her Journey
Principal Sembi’s first home was in El Cerrito. Her first school was WCCUSD’s Sheldon Elementary, where she spent kindergarten and first grade. She is the child of immigrants — her father is Kenyan (raised in England) and her mother is from India.
After she moved to Berkeley, she was bussed from her home in the flatlands to a school in the hills. In the second grade, her mother noticed she stopped doing her homework and seemed bored at school. Testing revealed she was reading on a fourth-grade level, and she skipped the rest of second grade.
Her first language was Punjabi and she began speaking English in preschool. She remembers that she wasn’t tested for English Language Development until the 10th-grade. The person testing her was surprised to learn that she already spoke English and sent her back to class.
In a high school AP English class, she and another student of color were offered help, which resulted in a teacher translating the text book into Spanish, thinking that was their first language. “All these experiences get ingrained in you and shape who you are,” she said.
Middle School Math and Literacy
Principal Sembi was a math teacher at Helms Middle School before becoming assistant principal and then serving as principal there for two years. A formative opportunity came when then-Principal Jessica Petrilli asked her to be the founding administrator for the Internationals Academy at Helms working with newcomer students.
“It was such an amazing opportunity where I got to spend a whole year just learning together with the team of founding teachers,” she said. The experience exposed her to the inequities newcomer students faced. “The services that we were providing them were really inequitable,” she said. “Those kiddos were an invisible minority in most classrooms because our systems are not set up to support them.”
This realization triggered a deep curiosity about literacy, one that came as a bit of a surprise. As a math teacher, she hadn’t thought much about how a young person learns to read. Her own experience of learning to read was that it came easily.
“If somebody asks me how I learned how to read, I’m just like, I don’t know,” she said. “I just learned how to read.”
“She was instrumental in being a founding administrator for the International Academy at Helms. And what a leadership role she played, mentoring and supporting and building that program brick by brick, side by side, with the teachers. It was in her heart to do that work.”
Choosing Michelle Obama and a Shift to New Curriculum
Principal Sembi wasn’t planning to leave Helms. But when the principal position at Michelle Obama Elementary opened, she took notice. The reason?
The school had been visioning around deeper learning frameworks and team teaching. “That really resonated with me as a secondary educator,” she said. “I know my one content area really well, and here is an elementary school that is leaning on that — having teachers focus on their one specific content area that they’re good at, and then students rotate through multiple teachers.”
After getting the job, she stepped into a school where teachers were frustrated with the curriculum and core instructional program. Instead of mandating a change from the top, she allowed the teachers to lead. She facilitated department reviews, and by the end of her first year, the team decided to pilot CKLA as the English Language Arts curriculum across the whole school.
Her messaging to teachers was clear: “I want to help you be the best educator you can be,” she said. “So if that means that there are different materials that are going to work better for you, then I am going to be invested in providing those materials to you.”
Data Shows Student Progress
Principal Sembi noticed that student data was stagnant. Students would make growth within the school year, but the next year they’d fall back. So the leadership team created a goal: 100% of students making at least one year’s growth, and accelerated growth targets for students reading below grade level.
Last year, the data showed real progress. iReady reading data from beginning to end of year showed growth in every tested grade, with increases in on/above grade level performance and decreases in students three or more years below. In iReady at the beginning of the year 17% of students were at or above grade level and that grew to 36% at the end of the year, a 19% increase.
This growth is also reflected in ELA CAASPP results, California’s state assessment for students in grades 3-6 at Obama Elementary. During the 24-25 school year, 19.8% of students scored at or above standard on CAASPP. Preliminary results for the 25-26 school year project that figure to increase to 26.25%, an improvement of approximately 6%.
While the school is on the right path, the work is far from over. “We’re not where we want to be, but we are taking one incremental step in the right direction,” she said. “So that’s feeling really good.”
The Antiracist Fellowship and Community of Practice
When Principal Sembi was at Helms, she experienced what she describes as “a lot of racialized harm.” She realized she needed affinity space, a place to work with other leaders of color to problem solve and discuss what it means to be effective.
The Antiracist Collective Fellowship with Lead Liberated, which she completed over two years, provided that. “It was such a good use of my time,” she said. “It provided me with community, and an opportunity to learn alongside other leaders of color.”
Principal Sembi is also part of the Chamberlin Education Foundation supported Instructional Leadership Community of Practice (ILCoP) with other school leaders in the district. “Being a school leader is super isolating,” she said. “Nobody else understands unless they’re also doing that same job. The community of practice does that for all of us.”
“Priya has grown in her ability to see the big picture while staying grounded in student learning and experience. Under her leadership, the instructional leadership team and professional learning communities sharpened their use of data to support students across the school. As a result, math achievement accelerated schoolwide, with 73.9% of students improving their scores from the prior year.”
When Principal Sembi was growing up, her dad lived in central Richmond, and she spent weekends there. When she started teaching at Kennedy, she realized her dad’s address was down the street and it could have been where she went to high school.
Now at Michelle Obama, her school is a feeder school to Kennedy, and she’s serving the students who may one day go there. She feels at home here. “There’s joy here, there’s learning here,” she said.
She said her focus is to buck the trends, to keep her students on a positive trajectory. “We’re still a flatlands Richmond public elementary school, and the expectation is that our students will not be successful,” she said. “And that is not something that I can stand behind. I strongly believe that our students are fully capable of doing anything and everything that they set their minds to, and I think it’s our job as educators to open up opportunities for them.”
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