RJ Mabanta

I came to school leadership through theatre. A K-12 principal recruited me out of community college teaching: she'd seen what I was doing in the classroom; and that became the first chapter of something I'm still building. What I brought from the stage wasn't a set of tricks. It was a way of seeing: who is in the room, what are they actually carrying, and what does the design need to hold for them to stay whole inside it. I have been asking that question across the Central Valley, West Sacramento, Roseville, Rancho Cordova, and San Diego ever since.

Logan Heights shaped me most. One of the few San Diego neighborhoods where BIPOC families could historically own property: Chicano Park, the Barrio, decades of fierce and beautiful resilience; and yet neighborhood kids had no high school of their own. Logan Memorial Educational Campus became a love letter from the district to a community that had been failed by its schools for too long. When trust came, families co-designed the institution. Four community-authored CTE pathways. Dual-enrollment with UCSD and SDCCD. A culture transformed. Today I hold a special assignment at Mission Bay High School, leading a shift in Specialized Academic Instruction. A different school, the same orientation: who is missing from this table, and what does the design need to hold for them?

Searchlight Studio is a narrative strategy consultancy I founded in 2025, operating at the foundational layer beneath branding, organizational strategy, and culture work. The premise is simple and the practice is not: most institutions are telling an incoherent story about themselves, and no amount of strategic planning resolves that until the story is right.

The proprietary framework (the Searchlight Method) moves through three phases: Illuminate, Align, Activate. It begins with a diagnostic read of the story currently being told, surfaces what is working, what is missing, and what is at stake, and then builds the conditions for genuine engagement. The work serves founders, school leaders, mission-driven organizations, and the branding and consulting agencies that encounter the narrative layer they cannot resolve internally.

Current engagements include DOA Academy of the Arts in Sacramento: an arts training institution building learning frameworks that allow world-class instruction to be transformational for every student. Community-based brand and narrative work in National City is also underway. IP protection for the Searchlight Method is in progress through the University of San Diego School of Law IP Legal Clinic.

Searchlight also houses Page 13: college and career planning with access to elite admissions strategy. The work specializes in the highest-stakes, most process-specific pathways; Ivies and near-Ivies, PLACs, service academies, conservatories, NCAA recruitment, global programs, and portfolio-based admissions. It also extends beyond traditional college timelines to include professional engagement planning and gap year design. These pipelines have always rewarded students who know how to tell the right story in the right format to the right reader. Page 13 exists so that knowing the rules is no longer a privilege of proximity.

searchlight.studio