Last year, a third-grade student at Harding University Partnership School went around campus asking students to sign her petition to build a tetherball court.
After collecting 100 signatures, she presented the petition to her principal, Veronica Binkley.
A year later, Binkley got the tetherball court built.
“That’s the way we roll here,” Binkley told the News-Press from her outdoor classroom at the elementary school. “Harding is the school where kids take action and make the world a better place.”
The 65-year-old called the Westside school her home for 14 years, 12 of those as principal. She announced her retirement at the end of this past school year.
She transformed Harding into a desirable academic destination. At one time, families that lived in the neighborhood looked to transfer out of the district. Under Binkley, famlies were looking to transfer in.
Binkley led an academic and cultural renaissance at the elementary school. Under her leadership, students’ test scores increased, she implemented new programs and created an outdoor classroom and STEAM lab.
She also strengthened the International Baccalaureate program and partnership with UC Santa Barbara and created a community school that gained the trust of the neighborhood.
She created a culture where every student felt like they belonged.
“Children are children,” Binkley said. “Evey child has the capacity to learn. All you need to do is to believe in them and then prove to them that you believe in them.”
Harding’s IB program—the only elementary school in the district with the accreditation—and its unique partnership with UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School of Education existed before Binkley became principal, but staff praised the way she sustained those programs.
“Veronica has helped create an environment in which the University is not simply an outside partner providing services, but a genuine member of the Harding community,” said Lilly Garcia. UCSB’s director of outreach.
Binkley introduced a framework for supporting the “whole child” by integrating social-emotional, academic and behavioral resources. It is a program that began at Harding, but was eventually adopted districtwide.
Working with Shane Jimerson and Garcia, who worked at UCSB’s Gevirtz School, UCSB students led “mini lessons” for Harding students about how to be a good human being or how to solve problems, Binkley said.
Binkley joined Harding in 2012 to help transition staff to the IB program.
“IB is just best practice,” Binkley said. “Because it’s student-centered. It really is 100% student-centric.”
It wasn’t her first experience with such a program.
In Bellingham, Washington, seven years prior, she opened the first IB school. Before that, she spent 15 years as a kindergarten teacher. She worked in Bellingham for five years, but said her husband didn’t like Washington, so they decided to move back to California.
So she took up a job at the Oxnard School District, as a literacy coach for two years. But she missed IB—so began the search that led her to Harding.
When Sally Kingston, the then principal at Harding, left her post to work at Carpinteria Unified, she recommended Binkley apply.
She didn’t get the position. But patience is a virtue.
She got a second chance, and Binkley was then hired as principal two years later.
The first issue she decided to tackle head-on was the literacy problem.
When Binkley became principal, only 17% of students were at or above the state average in reading and 12% for math.
“When 80% of your kids are not at grade level, this is not an intervention issue,” Binkley said. “This is a classroom issue.”
She started by putting a pause to IB.
“It was really hard, not a pretty time.” Binkley said. “You can’t create an IB curriculum with kids who can’t read because you need to use your voice and advocate for yourself…The teachers had the training, but the students didn’t have the belief in themselves and the ability to read. They weren’t readers.”
She “flooded” teachers with interventions, instructing educators how to teach reading with small group instruction and homogenous grouping. Then, she created a library that organizes books based on different reading levels. She’d host a weekly “cheerleading” meeting, sort of like a pep rally, with students.
In 2017, she created a “millionaire reading club,” rewarding students who’ve read a million words with millionaire treatment. Those millionaires went to Ice in Paradise, an escape room and a LandShark tour all via limo. The past school year, Harding recognized over 30 “millionaires.”
She began seeing the results of those interventions. Test scores increased, and so did the number of students wanting to transfer to Harding. This upcoming school year, despite a district-wide trend of declining enrollment numbers, the school is currently at capacity for transitional kindergarten-through-third grade, Binkley said.
One of her biggest goals as principal in the 2024-2025 school year was to meet 50% for reading and math scores.
“I promised the kids, look, if we can make or break 50%, then I’ll camp on the roof of Harding,” Binkley said. “Come to find out, you can’t camp on the roof of the school.”
While they were just shy of meeting their 50% goal — they reached 48.93% in reading and 44.85% in math—it was still higher than the state average of 48.8% in reading and 37.3% in math.
So she settled on getting “slimed” in front of the kids instead.
Cheering on students and making individual connections with them was part of her character as principal. Staff and parents said Binkley made her office, with its walls made of glass, always open to students.
“Kids were always coming in and showing her, like, ‘Look Miss Binkley! I can read this book now,’” said Mika Burkett, Harding’s IB coordinator. But she said Binkley was always in classrooms—especially kindergarten—singing songs with the students and pushing them to do their best.
An open-door policy also extended to Harding staff and parents—Binkley was noted as someone who always found a way to make things happen.
Burkett, for example, hesitantly approached Binkley with the idea of inviting a drumming band to its “All Around the Harding World” open house. Binkley immediately said yes.
“She believed in teachers, professionalism, and gave us autonomy, which is huge in IB,” Burkett said.
Many parents learned to admire Binkley.
Sean O’Brien, interested in enrolling his children at Harding, paid a visit to the school the summer before the COVID-19 pandemic. Binkley overheard him talking about a makerspace at MOXI, where he worked at the time. Then, unprompted, she asked O’Brien: “can we make a makerspace here at Harding?”
Four years later, a makerspace—in the form of an creative tech lab and nature-based learning spaces—opened on campus.
Together, Binkley and O’Brien found a grant through First 5 California to fund the creation of an outdoor classroom and a STEAM lab (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics), creating Harding as a pilot for an elementary school makerspace. She joked that now that her children are older, she has time to find and write grants.
The STEAM lab contains crafty technologies such as a kiln, die-cut machines and 3D printers. Binkley said students are free to choose what they want to make, whether it’s earrings or squishies, but teachers can also use it as part of their curriculum.
The outdoor classroom, at the center of campus, was converted from an industrial, underutilized section. It now contains an art area, a stage and mud kitchen, which were all tended to by members of the community. Like the STEAM lab, students and teachers are free to choose how they use the space.
But Harding wasn’t always the school with innovative features.
“With my parent hat on, I heard many parents say that Harding suffered from this narrative of being this hard school,” O’Brien said. “There were a lot of challenges—discipline type challenges, turnover of leadership, these websites that rate schools didn’t rate Harding well, which relied heavily on test scores.”
In the early 2000s, Harding struggled with low enrollment, low test scores, and high rates of students transferring to higher-performing schools.
“For the first five or six years of the 12 that I was here, Harding was like, ‘Oh, why are you sending your kids to Harding? You shouldn’t do that,'” Binkley said. “That was the buzz.”
O’Brien said that “so much of where Harding is at right now can be directly traced to Veronica.”
One of those parents who chose Harding, despite living in the Peabody school attendance area, was Patrick Melroy, an artist and art professor.
Before his child enrolled in TK, he interviewed every elementary school principal in Santa Barbara Unified. He found Binkley to be the principal who “did more than just show up for a job.”
He said his daughter gave Binkley a hug every time she saw her.
Last spring, Binkley invited Melroy to lead an elaborate art program with each of the grade levels, which involved first graders acting as astronauts with their makeshift helmets and Binkley as mission control.
“Veronica made that happen, this connection with a parent who does art,” Melroy said. “She created an environment where all of those people could create interesting and new programs.”
Binkley secured Harding as a California Community School, which came with a $1.5 million grant over six years, allowing her to successfully introduced several new programs and services.
The distinction intends to meet all of students’ and families needs by addressing socioeconomic barriers and tackling the achievement gap.
Currently, 70% of Harding’s student population is considered socioeconomically disadvantaged, Binkley estimated.
She took other actions to help students.
Two years ago, Binkley opened the playground to the public from after school hours to dusk. The Santa Barbara Public Library’s mobile library is on campus once a week for anyone wanting to check out a book. Before and after school programming, which includes parkour, cooking and dance, is available to all students. The FoodBank of Santa Barbara County offers a “healthy food pantry” on campus once a month.
“Another part of why Harding is doing so well is that the community has really embraced us,” Binkley said. “We support our families as much as we can. It is a wrap-around school.”
This past year, Harding students surpassed the 50% state testing scoreline Binkley set out to achieve. They scored 53% at/above in math and 52% at/above in reading.
At the end of May, Harding held its Spring Festival, where students in each grade expressed their gratitude for Binkley.
This coming fall, former Cleveland Elementary principal, Gabe Sandoval, will serve as the new principal of Harding.
Now, Binkley has much more time on her hands, but will turn her attention to life on a boat. On a recent day she was making cushions to enjoy life at sea. And the students will always be on her mind.
“Besides the fact that I’m 65 and need to retire, I felt like it was a good time to go because it’s exactly where… we made the goal to break that threshold of 50%,” Binkley said.
