Nicole Magtoto is an accomplished leader, education advocate and facilitator dedicated to building new realities for our young people.
A 3rd generation San Franciscan of Filipina, Mexican, Irish and Cape Verdean ancestry, she served San Francisco Unified School District - where she attended school - for 10 years, providing strategic and equity-centered leadership to a wide range of work across the district. Her multicultural background, and diverse schooling experiences as a student specifically influenced her work to empower young people and help them develop a sense of self-efficacy before they graduate.
As an Educational Policy Analyst she designed and implemented programming in alignment with Board of Education Resolutions and policies that focused on students dealing with parental incarceration, students experiencing homelessness. A primary focus of this work consisted reviewing and and developing anti-racist central-office processes to support students and families through year long advisory boards, pilot programming for district wide implementation and reviewing best practices already happening at school sites. Prior to that she worked in Human Resources as a Senior Human Capital Analyst, strategically staffing school-sites and central-offices with certificated and administrative staff.
Nicole is skilled at leading within complex systems where, using data and inquiry-based practices, she has been able to engage a wide range of stakeholders in design and improvement projects that remain student and family centered and with an anti-racist lens. Through holding space for difficult conversations, naming challenging dynamics and uplifting insights she has helped folks identify mechanisms for change within the very communities they are a part of.
Though she was born a Nicole, her mother immediately knew she was a 'Niki," which is the name most people call her by. As much as she has loved telling jokes, stories and performing in her lifetime, she is always seeking to be a part of an ensemble cast as much as she is seeking to be a star in any work she does.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College and a Master of Arts in Education: Equity & Social Justice from San Francisco State University. She was a Surge Institute Fellow in their inaugural Oakland, CA cohort, and long term serving member of the board of the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS). She occasionally consults for both Surge Institute and SF-CESS facilitating space within professional learning communities.