Board Hires Chancellor to Replace Derryberry : Education: The Ventura County Community College District’s choice is credited with reviving a weed- and graffiti-plagued Los Angeles campus.

Ventura County Community College District trustees Monday picked a new chancellor, a man credited with reviving a dying junior college in one of Los Angeles’ poorer areas.

Thomas Lakin, 47, president of Los Angeles Southwest Community College, emerged the winner in a seven-month search by the district to replace retiring Chancellor Barbara Derryberry. He will take the reins of the three-campus, 30,000-student district on July 1.

Although the trustees announced the appointment, they said they have not yet ironed out the details of Lakin’s four-year contract. His salary, they said, would be competitive with Derryberry’s $112,000-a-year salary.

“Dr. Lakin is a leader of character and quiet strength,” said Timothy D. Hirschberg, president of the board of trustees.

“He is a brilliant, tough-minded visionary, and we are very proud to have him,” said Hirschberg, citing a new era for the district, which has had a stormy past year.

Lakin promised that he would fight to improve the district. “I’ve never failed at anything I wanted to do in my life,” said Lakin, whose wife and two youngest daughters were present for the announcement.

Lakin, described by friends and colleagues as an affable but dogged fighter, comes to a district wracked by scandal in the past year. Trustee James T. (Tom) Ely faces trial next month on charges that he embezzled money from the district by filing allegedly false travel claims.

The new chancellor will also have to deal with the district’s financial problems, a fact that he acknowledged Monday. Because of dwindling state funds, district officials anticipate that next year’s budget will be $4.6 million less than the current budget of $64 million.

But Lakin is a man accustomed to challenge. When he took the job of running Los Angeles Southwest Community College five years ago, the school’s future looked grim.

Enrollment at the predominantly black two-year college had plummeted. Graffiti, trash and weeds were rampant on the campus. Either turn things around, Lakin was told by trustees, or the college was doomed.

“I became a graffiti expert and a graffiti warrior,” Lakin said.

Today he is credited with being the moving force behind Southwest’s revival. Under his direction, enrollment climbed from 2,200 to 6,000 students, exceeding even the trustees’ hopes.

“By and large, he turned the campus around,” said Harold Garvin, a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District. “One board member had wanted to close it. It was that bad.”

What Lakin did to turn around the college has almost become legend. He bought a batch of gardening tools and asked others to join him in an all-out war on the weeds.

A connoisseur of roses, he cleared two large areas in front of the campus and planted 100 carefully selected rose bushes in each. He hired someone to rid the campus of gophers and their burrows, which had made it impossible to mow the grass.

He went around picking up trash on the campus, and soon others followed suit. He issued an edict on graffiti: Remove it within 24 hours.

“Things started to happen,” said Major F. Thomas, Southwest’s dean of administration and a longtime college veteran. “The college became alive.”

Lakin brought in a new team of administrators. To boost enrollment, he tirelessly made the rounds of high schools, pulling students aside and advising them about financial aid.

He started an accelerated program for working adults that guaranteed them an associate’s degree in two years. The college opened classes to high school students who hadn’t lived up to their academic potential, and to students who simply wanted to strengthen their skills before college.

He brought the college into the computer age, offering high-tech classes such as computer-assisted design and word processing.

“There wasn’t one computer in one office when I arrived here,” Lakin said.

Nor did the school have a football team. Lakin reintroduced football and successfully fought for $20 million in state funds for a gymnasium and a technical education building.

“He made 25 to 30 trips to Sacramento to get them funded,” Thomas said.

He also organized a fund-raising foundation at the college. A veteran runner and marathon racer, he often takes pledges of $1 a mile from friends and fellow workers and contributes the proceeds to the foundation. Through his running, he has raised $4,000 to $5,000.

Friends, co-workers and students describe him as a fighter and champion of the underdog.

Two years ago when Lavonnya Childs, 24, began summer classes at Southwest, she had a negative attitude about education, she said.

“Dr. Lakin came to each of the summer classes, introduced himself, and made it known that if we needed anything to come to his office,” said Childs, vice president of the college’s student association and an upcoming June graduate.

“He’s like a father figure to me,” she said. “It’s not just me. A lot of students feel that way.”

Garvin and others in the nine-college Los Angeles district described Lakin as an energetic, persistent college president who isn’t afraid to try risky approaches or to take a position.

“We have a chancellor who likes to hear only good things,” Garvin said. But Lakin tells the good and the bad, he said. “I admire that very much.”

Lakin said he wanted to become a chancellor for the challenge of running more than one campus. But an equal factor was the desire to move his family out of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Southwest Community College is in the heart of the city’s black community. Founded in 1967 in the aftermath of the Watts riots, the junior college was envisioned as an educational ladder of opportunity for blacks in the ghettos of South-Central Los Angeles.

Until recently, enrollment was 90% to 95% black. Now Latino students make up about a quarter of the enrollment, according to Garvin.

The ethnic makeup couldn’t be more different in Ventura County. The student population at the three campuses--in Ventura, Oxnard and Moorpark--is about 70% white, 20% Latino and 3% black.

The issue of race didn’t enter his mind, Lakin said, when he considered the move to Ventura County. Lakin, the district’s first black chancellor, says he has no plan to boost the district’s minority ratio.

“I may be culturally and ethnically proud, but I will never limit the potential for development to one group,” he said. However, providing opportunities for minorities has always been a top priority of his.

He said students go to college for an education and to improve themselves. “It doesn’t matter if they are born with a silver spoon or in abject poverty,” he said, they still need a nurturing environment.

He comes from a large, educationally minded family. His cousins include the astronaut Chuck Bolden and Ralph Carter, who appeared on the television show “Good Times.”

His two older daughters are college graduates, one from Harvard, the other from Cal State San Diego. His two younger daughters are 5 and 2.

He began his educational career in 1967 as a counselor and social sciences teacher at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. He joined the college district in 1969 as an economics instructor and counselor. He rose through the administrative ranks, working at Harbor College and Mission College.

After serving as vice president of academic affairs at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, he became president of Southwest in 1986.

“He has a good reputation,” said veteran faculty member Bill Doyle, who acknowledged that he was not in the administration’s camp. Doyle, a union official who for several years handled grievances for the district, said Lakin was “willing to go out on a limb on academic issues and challenge immediate supervisors.”