Well-Traveled Principal Rani Goyal Helps Helix Move On

Folks at Helix Charter High School have grown tired of talking about the teacher sexual misconduct cases of recent years and their fallout. They have a short answer for prying questions: That was in the past. Helix High has moved on.

No one personifies this more than Rani Goyal, hired over the summer to take over as executive director of the 2,450-student charter school. She replaced Doug Smith, who resigned after 21 years as part of a settlement between the Grossmont Union High School District and Helix High.

"We need to start focusing on the positive," Goyal said. "Let's focus on the present and the future and where we're going. I mean, we had a 20-point gain on the API. Only one other school in the district had that kind of a gain."

Helix and Santana High School in Santee both posted 20-point gains in the state's annual Academic Performance Index, which measures how students fare on state testing  in core subjects. The goal is to score 800 and above. Helix High posted a 795 on the API, second to Valhalla High in Rancho San Diego, which scored 809. Helix last year was named a California Distinguished School.

Helix High board President Brian Kick said Goyal is a perfect fit for Helix because of her past experiences as an "instructional leader."

"We were looking for someone who had charter experience, experience running a comprehensive high school with a similar diverse population as ours, someone well-versed in the latest pedagogy," Kick said.

Before her arrival at Helix in early September, Rani (pronounced Ronnie) Goyal was principal for three years at Temecula Valley High School, a large school with a diverse student population in Riverside County. The school's API scores rose by 51 points during the past two years.

"I worked with the teachers to help them better their own practices," she said. Goyal started a schoolwide intervention program, curriculum teams and increased training for teachers.

At Helix, "the board wants me to lead the school in a direction that promotes student achievement," she said. She's spent her first month meeting with teachers to "find out what we could do better and what their expectations are of me."

She has also been meeting with parents and members of the community. She was hired July 30 but did not start until Sept. 7 because of obligations to her former school.

"She has hit the ground running," said Kick. "We're looking forward to a bright future with her–API scores of 800 and better."

Goyal, 44, who is of Indian and Italian descent, is an active person–period–and has many interests.

She enjoys playing golf, hiking, biking, reading and traveling. She has been to Prague, Budapest, Vienna, India, Singapore, Seoul, London, Ireland, Australia and Mexico—all in the past seven years.

Her career has taken her across the country and up and down California.

Goyal began her career in 1990 as a history teacher and later as an assistant principal in Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. In 2004, she moved to California, where she served as principal of Leadership Public Schools in San Jose and Richmond, both charter schools. She began as an assistant principal at Temecula Valley High in 2006 and was promoted to principal the following year.

At Temecula Valley High, she also dealt with a teacher sexual misconduct case, saying: "It did happen in Temecula. I'll leave it at that."

In June, Jeremy Buchholz, a former Temecula Valley High teacher, was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to having sex with a former student. He was arrested in January 2009 after a four-month investigation.

Four former Helix Charter High School teachers were arrested and convicted of sex crimes between December 2006 and September 2008, prompting the school to adopt stricter teacher-student policies.

The Grossmont district's board threatened to revoke the school's charter after an assistant principal was accused of giving a troubled student a ride to a bus station last year but reached a settlement with the charter school in April that led to the hiring of a new executive director—essentially the head principal.

The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding that includes a "compact for positive relations."

One of the conditions requires that "neither party shall say anything negative about the other party."

Goyal said she has no problem working under those conditions.

What happened at Helix, she said, "was before my tenure and I'm working with the [Grossmont] superintendent to forge a positive partnership between Helix and Grossmont."