Principal, Carpenter Community Charter School

Amna Nawaz: Joseph Martinez is the longtime principal of Carpenter Community Charter School in Los Angeles. And families know him as the principal who literally picks up trash in the morning and dresses up for school plays, but also as the steady hand through fires, immigration fears, and lockdown drills.

In tonight's Brief But Spectacular, Martinez makes the case for why public education remains a smart investment.

Joseph Martinez, Principal, Carpenter Community Charter: Public education, to me, is equivalent to our democracy. If we don't have a strong public education system that will accept everyone, that will be competitive with all the private schools in the area, then I don't see our democracy thriving as it has for the past 250 years.

I am the principal of Carpenter Community Charter in Studio City, Los Angeles, California. I'm responsible for approximately 900 students daily. Whatever it takes to engage children at an elementary school, I am game for it. I have been everything from Elliott from "E.T.," Willy Wonka. I have been Woody, the cowboy, setting the tone and embrace elementary school for all that it has to offer.

There is no job that is above or below me, if that's cutting the grass or if that's picking up trash. I hope that they see that everybody has to pitch in, that they have to participate in order for their community to thrive.

So I'm born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. Everybody in my family worked in the service industry. My mother and my grandmother both worked in the kitchens at various hotels. My father was a bellman. So I grew up watching everybody in my family be service-oriented.

As a school administrator in Los Angeles now, I try to have that same mentality. I think of it as a hotel to give everybody the greatest experience in elementary school that they could have.

One of the reasons why I'm not in private education is because we accept everyone. LAUSD is a sanctuary school district and that means that any family that enrolls their child for school has a safe place for that child to be at school so that they can learn.

We don't turn anyone away. At all LAUSD public schools, we have meetings and we have resources for immigrant families that are facing a crisis or any kind of a situation involving ICE.

My father came from Mexico. He did not have his citizenship until very late in his life. So I understand the struggles and the challenges of immigrant families and their children. I love building relationships. I would go visit my parents when they worked in hotels, and I was always amazed at how much of a family it really was with my mother and the people she worked with in the kitchens or my father and the people he worked with that were all bellmen.

Whatever job I was going to have in the future, I wanted to have that. So that's my favorite part of my job is building community, building relationships and building a support network for our school community.

My name is Joseph Martinez, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on bringing hospitality to public education.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.