Berkeley Unified School District has over 9,000 students, but only one District Registrar. Located in room D-143 at Berkeley High School, Tiffany Sutherland works as the registrar for the entire school district.
Sutherland is in charge of a myriad of tasks as the District Registrar; authorizing work permits, inputting grades, sending official transcripts, keeping and accessing records, and more. She finds it to be a taxing, but rewarding, job.
“I’m constantly in emails, constantly updating grades, there is no real downtime,” Sutherland said. She often stays after school to wrap things up, going beyond her official hours.
The Registrar’s Office is a resource most frequently used by BHS seniors, though it’s important to know about the resources Sutherland supplies for all other grades as well; Sutherland manages concurrent enrollment for students taking classes at community college as well as classes at BHS.
Sutherland also oversees work permits, which are an important resource if you are a BHS student looking to be employed. Most commonly, BHS students work food service jobs, although Sutherland also often sees applications for work at toy stores.
Sutherland has been working at BHS and within BUSD for 20 years. Barbara Mellion was the District Registrar then, and started training Sutherland to be her replacement: handling new student arrivals, entering grades, handling substitute teachers, etc. After approximately three years, she was ready to begin.
“They were like, hey we can’t really cross train you anymore here, we need you to go somewhere else so that … you can really fully do the things that we’re training you to do,” Sutherland said.
When a position opened up in the Berkeley Independent Study program (BIS), Sutherland applied and got the job. Working within BIS, she started doing many of the things for that program that she would later do as the District Registrar. Sutherland learned to enroll students in classes and make sure their courses met the California A-G graduation requirements. She also managed students’ concurrent enrollment.
Seven years later, a position opened up in the BHS counseling office, and Sutherland took the job, returning to working at BHS.
Although Sutherland feels she has big shoes to fill as the successor of Mellion she feels “blessed where Mellion still does mentor me, so I can always call her and ask her different questions and things like that,” Sutherland said.
When it became time for Mellion to retire, Sutherland asked her to wait until her youngest child had graduated BHS. “So my youngest graduated in ‘22, Mellion retired in … December of ‘23, and I was able to apply for the position, and I got it,” Sutherland said.
Since then, she has been working at BHS as the District Registrar. Sutherland works with many BHS seniors, managing their transcripts for college applications and things they are planning to do beyond high school. Her favorite thing about the job is making sure that everyone’s transcripts are in order. “I get to see that they’ve finished and that their accomplishment has been met,” Sutherland said.