Jason Hughes is the most recent addition to the campus supervisor team at Sunny Hills, increasing the total number to four.
“My job is to keep everyone safe; that’s the primary goal,” Hughes said.
Besides his new role, he’s an assistant football coach at Fullerton Union High School.
His campus supervisor hours were pre-set from the start — noon-3:45 p.m., Monday through Friday, while his football coach schedule varies. However, as the season progresses, Hughes will be at Fullerton Monday through Friday for about three hours of practice after school.
“I’m fair, and I think that if something were to go wrong, I can handle pressure very well,” he said. “I have come across injuries that I was able to help with.”
Principal Craig Weinreich said Hughes was hired because of his strong connections to the SH community, having been a former parent and football coach.
“The familiarity with the campus, culture and community — those types of things right there help,” Weinreich said.
ONE JOB AT A TIME
After graduating from high school, Hughes said he chose not to attend college and focus on going right to work because of financial reasons. He first did security work for events like weddings and kickboxing events, which rotated around depending on where the work was.
Hughes initially learned about the security job through a fellow coach who knew of his situation and then passed along his name to others. He didn’t work for a specific organization; instead, his opportunities came through word-of-mouth, and his strong work ethic led to more callbacks for specific events.
As a security guard, Hughes said he encountered all kinds of situations — including one of his first jobs in which his First Aid training came into play when someone started having a stroke.
“For the most part, it was just maintaining a presence and offering to help wherever the company or the guests needed,” he said, referring to his security job, which he still works from time to time.
With his passion for computers, Hughes said he also worked as a project manager at OpenText — a software company that helps organizations manage information and elevate human potential through information management — for 23 years from July 2000 to May 2023. In this role, he managed the company’s renewal process, which involved opening a case for each customer’s application and tracking the progress until completion.
He said he left the company after his position was eliminated because of restructuring, forcing him to let go of over 300 active projects.
A month before interviewing for Sunny Hills, Hughes said he interviewed once before to work at Troy and Buena Park high schools in August but didn’t get hired. He said his interview to work here was his second one, since Troy and Buena Park were done together with administrators from both schools in the room asking questions.
Hired in October 2024, Hughes wasn’t working at Sunny Hills for the first time. Hughes had brought his passion for football to Sunny Hills, coaching the team starting in 2019. He had played the sport for 12 years, starting at the age of 6.
“Football was something I just wanted to try and then I fell in love with it,” he said. “I never looked back after that.”
Soon after, he stopped coaching SH football in 2023 because he had been out of work over a year at the time, and it came down to financial reasons. However, Hughes said he has been maintaining his relationships with his former football players.
Football player junior Israel Aguilar, who played under Hughes during his freshman year on the frosh/soph team, said he still talks with the campus supervisor almost daily.
“We talk about how our football teams are doing,” Aguilar said. “We also talk about how we are doing and how the team is looking.”
Similar to his relationship with Aguilar, football player junior Christopher Ozuna said he and Hughes share a strong bond.
“As a coach, he was always open to trying new things,” Ozuna said, referring to football. “I like his personality because he’s super nice.”
The campus supervisor said he is grateful for the life skills he learned from being involved with that sport, which ranged from being able to work with a team and to stick together even when things are bad.
“A lot of things that I’ve learned turned around and came true in my working life,” he said.
