The New Kid at School

Anthony Valencia has three children that he parents with his girlfriend. Dogs to be exact. Valencia has three yorkie terriers named, Rudy, Allie and Boomer. Valencia is San Dieguito Academy’s new part-time campus supervisor and has been working here for about a month.

Valencia’s usual day consists of “… just circulating around campus to make sure that no one is hanging out around campus when they shouldn’t be unless they have an excuse. I just make sure that the campus is safe and that everyone is where they need to be at all times.” He also makes sure that students get to class on time, and that they have their passes.

As a child, Valencia said that he was always very respectful to the campus security at his school. Valencia graduated in 1998 from Oceanside High School. He said that for a while, he had no idea what he wanted to do. But he knew he wanted to take up a job in the school districts, because his mom had worked in school districts for the past 30 years.

Before working at San Dieguito Academy, Valencia said he worked at a few video game stores. He was also an amateur skateboarder, with sponsors and everything, but decided to quit after he fell doing a trick off of a 16-17 foot-drop at a sea wall, and broke his heel during the landing.

Before pursuing a career in security, he worked for Google. “[My favorite job] was Google. Working for that company is probably one of the most thought-jobs there is in the world, and I don’t have a degree, and I’m one of the rare ones that actually got accepted into Google… Oh yeah, and you could bring your pets to work, so that was one of the benefits of working at Google.”

Along with being a part-time supervisor at San Dieguito Academy, Valencia also is a full time night supervisor at the Wyndham hotel in Oceanside. Valencia said that the most common ‘bust’ at the hotel, is people trespassing on hotel property, trying to steal valuable items.

He said that he received the ‘On the Spot’ award for catching a man who was trying to steal belongings off of hotel property for four months. “He had been coming back every day (sometimes two to three times in one day) … Sure enough, that same day, the guy came back and I caught him. He tried fighting us, but we held him down.”

Valencia said that his high school experience wasn’t exactly the safest. “When I went to Oceanside, there were a lot of gangs there and it was a pretty rough school,” he said. “I graduated in ‘98, so times were rougher back then. Students didn’t have that much respect for staff and their peers.”

But when asked where he would chose to go, Oceanside High School or San Dieguito Academy, he replied, “I would have picked San Dieguito in a heartbeat.” Now San Dieguito has chosen Valencia.