November 1, 2006

TO THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY

Dear Colleagues:

We are writing to inform you that Dr. Joe Castro, Executive Director of Academic Preparation and Equal Opportunity (APEO), has accepted an offer from UC San Francisco to serve as their Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Academic Affairs, pending Regental approval. His final day on campus was October 31. While we are so sad to see Joe leave, we are also happy for this career advancement for him to become the chief student affairs officer at UCSF.

We want to thank Joe for his dedicated service to UC Santa Barbara since June 2001. In collaboration with the Chancellor’s Outreach Advisory Board and the talented APEO staff, he has been instrumental in strengthening our P-20 student academic preparation and educational partnership programs during a period of decreased state funds. Joe has played a lead role in designing, implementing and securing private funds to support many new initiatives, including Santa Barbara Pathways, James Jimenez Scholars Program, Project Excel, and the Chumash Scholars Program. His contributions and those of many of our colleagues have helped us to increase the diversity of our student population and become a leader in this area among AAU institutions.

Since 2004, Joe has also served as our Equal Opportunity Officer and Public Records Information Coordinator. As Equal Opportunity Officer, he has worked with the Academic Senate and colleagues across the campus to increase understanding of and support for equal opportunity policies and regulations, and to develop strategies that have the potential to increase the diversity of faculty and staff. Joe has also successfully mediated a number of challenging and complex equal opportunity complaints.

Finally, Joe has served as Adjunct Associate Professor in our Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, where he has taught graduate seminars and led research projects focused on P-20 leadership and policy issues. In this role, he has mentored many undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds.

Please join us in thanking Joe for his extraordinary contributions to UC Santa Barbara and our surrounding community. We are grateful to him for his accomplishments and pleased that he will continue to be part of the leadership at UCSF.

We will be using this transition as an opportunity to review the functions of the Office of Academic Preparation and Equal Opportunity, and in the coming weeks, we will be consulting broadly with the campus on this topic. During this review period (beginning November 1, 2006), we are delighted to announce that Claudia Martinez, the current Associate Director for the Office of APEO, has agreed to serve as Acting Director for academic preparation, and Ray Huerta will serve as the Acting Director of the equal opportunity and public record functions. We are extremely fortunate to have the help of these experienced professionals as we take time to consider how we can best address the needs of the campus in the future. A brief biography on each of them follows.

Claudia Martinez: Since 2005, Claudia Martinez has been the Associate Director for UCSB’s Office of Academic Preparation and Equal Opportunity, where she has supported the development, management, and coordination of a number of K-12 student academic preparation and educational partnership programs that promote increased college-going rates among local students. Prior to that, she served for nearly four years as the Project Director for our campus’s ENLACE y Avance (Engaging Latino Communities for Education) project, a multi-million dollar initiative of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation within the Center for Chicano Studies. She came to UCSB from UC Merced, where she was one of the founding staff members and where she held progressively responsible positions in the Office of Academic Programs as a Program Analyst, Assistant Director, and, ultimately, Interim Director. Prior to entering the field of higher education, Claudia worked in a variety of non-profit and policy-oriented organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Public Policy Institute of California.

Claudia received her bachelor of arts degree in law and social policy from UC Berkeley and received her master’s degree in public policy from UC Berkeley’s Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP).

Raymond Huerta: In 2003, Ray Huerta retired from UCSB after 30 years of distinguished service as our Affirmative Action Coordinator. For much of that time, he also served as our campus’s Public Records Information Coordinator. Prior to his appointment at UCSB, he served the Berkeley campus, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and the UC Office of the President in various positions that steadfastly advanced the principles of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action. Ray received his bachelor’s degree in history from UC Berkeley and a J.D. in law from UC Davis.

In addition to his administrative duties, Ray has been a regular lecturer in our Department of Chicano/a Studies on the civil rights of Chicanos/as in the United States. He has also lectured at the law school at the Autonomous University of Queretaro in Queretaro, Mexico, on legal issues affecting the Chicano/a community in the United States. For over a decade, Ray has directed a very successful Travel Study Abroad program through Summer Sessions for our students in Queretaro, Mexico.

We deeply appreciate Joe’s dedicated service to the campus, and we are tremendously grateful to Claudia and Ray for taking on these interim duties during this critical time.

Sincerely,
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor

Gene Lucas
Executive Vice Chancellor