On May 8, the staff of Pajaro Middle School formally declared a vote of no confidence in Principal Nicole Killian in a letter to Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) Superintendent Heather Contreras.
According to the letter, the decision was reached following an affirmative majority vote of 14 out of 17 full-time certificated union members, as well as an additional anonymous affirmation from classified staff.
The vote was primarily attributed to Killian’s alleged failure to provide a safe school environment for students and teachers, as well as to a lack of communication and transparency.
“Pajaro Middle School has long been a school with a foundation of collaboration between the administration and both classified and certified staff,” reads the letter to Contreras. “Nicole Killian has not only ignored this foundation, but dismantled it.”
Killian has been the full-time principal at Pajaro Middle School since the fall of 2024. She previously served as the principal at Main Street Elementary for one year during the 2023-24 school year.
“The District takes all reports related to school operations and safety seriously,” said PVUSD Public Information Officer Alejandro Chávez in a statement to the Pajaronian. “We remain confident in the site leadership’s ongoing commitment to maintaining a safe, supportive, and positive learning environment.”
Chávez maintained that the events were not newsworthy and that “there’s nothing there,” and declined to answer specific questions about the allegations against the district, principal Killian, or the events on campus.
Killian and Superintendent Heather Contreras did not respond to requests for comment.
Complaints about Killian’s leadership at Pajaro began to emerge only a few months after she took the role of principal, said Brandon Diniz, president of the Pajaro Valley teachers union. With teachers and staff citing a lack of student discipline and communication.
Throughout the 2024-25 school year, the concern across the site continued to grow, said Tim Powers, one of the two PVFT site representatives and a teacher at Pajaro Middle School.
These concerns grew, especially after a notable incident in which a teacher was allegedly kept in the dark about a physical threat a student had made against them, which the district intercepted via an internal language-monitoring algorithm.
“What the student wrote was said to have been, ‘change my grade or else.’ So pretty vague,” said Powers. “When the teacher finally got Ms. Killian to show the actual statement written by the student, the statement was ‘change my grade or else I’ll shoot you.’”
According to Ben Waite, the other PVFT site representative and a teacher at Pajaro Middle School, it wasn’t until five days after the incident that Killian finally showed the teacher the original message, and that the staff member who was threatened initially learned of it the same day from another staff member. However, this incident was not officially reported in a grievance to the district.
According to the letter to Contreras, five staff members filed a grievance against Killian in the 2024-25 school year.
During that time, Killian didn’t have a vice principal, said Diniz, “as a result of that first grievance, they did assign a vice principal to the school site.”
At the beginning of the new school year, the staff were hopeful for change, explained Powers, adding that he and Waite additionally spoke with Killian and set up regular meetings with the principal for the 2025-26 school year to address on-site issues as they arose.
However, despite these meetings, Powers and Waite felt that the concerning behavior and leadership remained unchanged.
“We brought up several times to her like, ‘hey, we need to get better about the communication, about what’s going on with students and discipline, and follow up,’” said Powers, “and that continued to not stick.”
Throughout, the incidents on campus—along with the lack of communication and disrespect towards teachers—continued, alleged Diniz, who also described multiple incidents in which he alleges that Killian downplayed the severity and disregarded the Ed. Code procedures.
There was one such case where a student threatened another student with a kind of homemade dagger, said Diniz, “when the student brandishes a dirk, dagger, or knife Ed. Code requires the principal to recommend that student for expulsion, and she [Killian] just basically covered it up.”
Around the fall of 2025, Powers and Waite were approached by a few staff members to conduct a vote of no confidence.
Powers maintains that, throughout the process, staff remained willing to attempt to work with Killian.
“We were initially reluctant at that point to pursue that,” said Waite. “We probably held out the longest in terms of trying to work with her.”
For Powers, this changed in March, referring to a lockdown mentioned in the letter to Contreras, during which Killian was allegedly unresponsive to multiple radio calls during a police chase on March 5, which had prompted the school to initiate a lockdown.
An event that Powers referred to as “the final nail in the coffin.”
“At this point, there was a lack of trust,” said Powers. “The breakdown causes us to kind of retreat internally and try to solve problems with students more so than we should. And so over time, it impacts our ability to even teach on a regular schedule.”
Finally, in early May, Diniz said he informed Contreras of the plan for the vote of no confidence.
“[Contreras] gave me the assurance on May 5 that she was going to remove her as principal,” said Diniz. “She said not to even go through with the vote [of no confidence] because she hears us and she’s willing to act. ”
The site decided to continue to move forward with the vote regardless, said Diniz.
It was then that PVUSD Area III Trustee Gabriel Medina learned about the vote when the resolution letter to Contreras landed in his inbox a few weeks ago.
“It doesn’t feel like the district is doing their due diligence,” said Medina. “I’m hoping that it gets addressed. But the way that I’ve seen leadership kind of take these complaints, I’m not going to be holding my breath.”
However, according to Diniz, on May 22, following an unsuccessful meeting with district representatives, Contreras began to walk back on the promises. Following that, the union decided to make the events and the vote of no confidence public, said Diniz.
Since then, Diniz, Waite and Powers feel that there has been no progress, instead “only doubling down by the superintendent,” according to Diniz.
“It just sort of has spiraled to the point where we feel there’s no future for that site under Principal Killian, and she’s lost her staff,” said Diniz. “Trust is lost in buckets, but earned in drops, and she has lost buckets’ worth of trust with that staff.”
