Karling Aguilera-Fort
Dr. Karling Aguilera-Fort is the Deputy Superintendent at SFUSD.
Prior to returning to SFUSD, Dr. Aguilera-Fort served as the Superintendent of Schools for the Schools of the Oxnard School District during 2019-2023. Dr. Aguilera-Fort also served as the Superintendent of the El Rancho Unified School District (ERUSD) from 2017-2019.
Dr. Aguilera-Fort has served as Bilingual Special Education teacher, school principal and assistant superintendent in charge of supervising PK-12 schools in SFUSD. His career has focused on ensuring high quality and equitable education for students who historically have not been served properly by our educational system. Dr. Aguilera-Fort is a firm believer in developing the whole child. He states, “We must support the development of the whole educator in order to provide the tools and mindset to address the needs of the students we receive every day in our classrooms.”
Dr. Aguilera-Fort possesses school site, district, and regional national and international experience across PK-12 and college levels. Throughout his career as educational leader he has supervised, coached, and mentored school and district leaders at all levels. He has been responsible for overseeing a number of programs created to address the needs of students that historically have not been served properly by our educational system. These programs include English Learner Services, Special Education Services, and Standard English Learner Services. These experiences have reinforced his beliefs on leading through a Student-Centered approach.
His work with the Superintendent Fellows is generating a different meaning to the concept of student involvement. This idea is developing future leaders through the empowerment to find solutions to the different dilemmas and challenges students face in our schools today. This work is about student empowerment and about students helping adults to understand the needs and perspective of the students.
He credits his experience as a special education teacher as significantly influencing his career’s work. It includes early education intervention and prevention teacher, elementary and middle school special education teacher, and general education teacher. Aguilera-Fort has been a lecturer in the Principal Leadership Institute at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.
Originally from Venezuela where he worked at different levels in the educational system within Special Education, Dr. Karling Aguilera-Fort was invited to teach in the Spanish Bilingual Special Education setting in SFUSD. Since the beginning of his career, he has been involved with the issues of equity and social justice on behalf of the most marginalized students. He has served as President of the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) Board of Directors, a role that he performed from 2007-2010, and from 2014-2017. He attended the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley where he obtained his Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership. Dr. Aguilera-Fort earned his doctorate in Educational Leadership from the East Carolina University through the International and Global Leadership program hosted in Thailand.