Women Leaders … with Kelly Barbazette: Gilroyan finds joy in helping create buildings the have lasting meaning
“I wanted to build something that had lasting meaning for my communities”
By Kelly Barbazette
Kelly Barbazette
Jenny Derry
When Jenny Derry set her sights 20 years ago on a top-to-bottom renovation of her family’s fixer upper, she unknowingly began building the foundation of a career that has helped transform schools in her community and beyond.
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Derry about how combining her knowledge of land use and her design and construction know-how sparked her love for designing and building educational facilities.
“Building facilities that really mean something to the community is the single biggest reward at the end of this hard work,” said, Derry, 55. “You’re building something that you know is a community asset, in particular education. We get to build things that students will thrive in.”
Born in San Leandro, Derry moved to Gilroy with her family at age 2 and attended Gilroy public schools. She studied journalism at Cal Poly, graduating in 1990. Upon returning to Gilroy, she worked as a writer and editor at the Dispatch newspaper before becoming a land use advisor for former Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage in 1998. There, she helped residents and developers who were building a home or project navigate the process.
“I just loved the planning aspect of it, looking forward and trying to envision what sorts of development would be best for the county and our constituents,” she said.
In 2003, she accepted the role of executive director of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau. She was in charge of representing farmers and ensuring their land use needs were met. About that time, Derry and her husband, Mark, were looking to move and found an older house Derry believed had the potential to be their dream home.
“I thought I could design what we want,” she said. “That was really my first project. I thought it was interesting and fun and I wanted to do it full time.”
She continued to work for the county while launching her business, Jenny Derry Design. After two years, she had developed enough clientele to work full-time at her new venture. She started out with small residential projects and expanded to full-home renovations.
“It was learn by doing,” Derry said, adding she enjoyed the work. Ten years after starting her business, she realized she wanted to stretch her horizons further to schools or municipal buildings.
“I wanted to build something that had lasting meaning for my communities,” she recalled.
She shared her dreams with her mom, who at the time was a Gilroy school board member, who told her that school districts hired planning managers to build schools.
Derry wasted no time in calling the Gilroy Unified School District facilities manager and asked about meeting, explaining she would love to learn about building schools. Derry said she learned a lot from him.
“They were so kind,” she said.
A couple months later, Gilroy Unified posted a job opening for a project manager. Derry immediately shared the news with her husband and applied for the job. During the interview, Derry asked what projects she would be overseeing. She learned that the new project manager, GUSD’s second, would be rebuilding half of Glen View School and building a new stadium at Christopher High School.
“Inside I was thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Derry said. “And I said, ‘OK, those would be great projects.’”
Derry quickly learned she loved to problem solve on a larger scale and help her client, in this case GUSD, achieve the design they envisioned. The Glen View School project proved to be particularly challenging because it involved demolishing and rebuilding half of the school during the year, which meant finding a place to house students while not disrupting class time. She completed the project on budget and on time and then moved on to the next one — a stadium at Christopher High School. The project was funded by the Christopher family.
“It was a fantastic experience to work with donor money and to make sure all needs are met,” she said. “I feel like a caretaker in the process sometimes. Taking care of the people and making sure the team …. they have everything they need and ultimately that the community gets what it needs.”
She next wanted to broaden her skills again, this time working with colleges. She worked with universities on both coasts helping to plan new facilities. Some of the projects took place during the pandemic, which she said proved challenging because she couldn’t visit the campuses. Once she was able to travel, she said she enjoyed working with clients from across the country.
“And lots of people who work with schools want the best for students. They have just great goals to make education fun and exciting. To work with people from all over the country expanded my horizons a bit,” she said.
During the course of her work, she met a general contractor who was implementing a method of building, called collaborative construction, that interested Derry. Instead of conventional building, which entails keeping the construction and design processes separate, the architects and contractors work together on the design, combining their knowledge and maximizing the project budget.
During that time, Derry completed an online program and received her master’s degree in project management from Georgetown University. She graduated in person in 2021 and had the opportunity to see her fellow classmates for the first time.
She began working last year with Flint Builders as director of preconstruction and is currently working with a team of planners and architects to build a library and student resource center at Gavilan College. The new building will consist of a collaborative space where students can gather and a library, in total containing 18 separate departments.
“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Derry said. “You have to put everything together so that it makes sense. And it has to be light and bright and inspiring.”
Work began on the estimated 90,000-square-foot building, located near the college’s theater, in January 2023 and it’s slated to be completed in June 2026.
“It will be the first building you see on campus,” Derry said. “It’s pretty awesome for me to be a hometown girl to design something that is that important for the campus.”
Teaming up with her colleagues who share the same goal of doing excellent work is really motivating, Derry said.
“I couldn’t have foreseen having this specialty. I feel really lucky to have this job, but I could never have dreamed it up because I didn’t even know it existed,” she said.
She said her family, including her husband, Mark, of 25 years, their three daughters, and five grandchildren, have always been supportive of her goals.
When asked what advice she’d offer other women, she said to go for an opportunity even if it’s intimidating.
“To try to be fearless because you won’t fail,” she said. “If you head toward something with a sense of purpose, even if you don’t get there, you’ll discover something else special along the way. Don’t look at something and say I can’t do that. Look at it and say I’m going to try.”
Kelly Barbazette is a freelance writer who has lived in Gilroy for more than 20 years.