School System Chief Looks Ahead as He Prepares to Retire

Despite a slew of innovative education programs, Pasadena schools face a future of less money and more gang problems, the departing superintendent said last week.

Two days after he announced he would retire June 30, Philip Linscomb spoke about his accomplishments during six years in Pasadena, the problems the district still faces and why he will be leaving after just a year as superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District.

After 37 years in education, Linscomb, 60, says he’d like to spend more time with his wife and three sons, the youngest of whom is a senior at San Pedro High School.

Linscomb might go back to teaching, perhaps at a university like Pepperdine, where he once taught education. He also is active in Mary, Star of the Sea Catholic Church in San Pedro.

“You just come to a point where it’s time to do other things because you realize you don’t have that much time left,” Linscomb said Thursday. “I’ve spent precious little time with my children as they grew up.”

Linscomb’s departure may set off a state or national search to find a new superintendent for the 22,020-student district, the second-largest in the San Gabriel Valley after Pomona Unified.

But George Van Alstine, the Pasadena board vice president, said the board might also pick an insider if they found someone qualified. Van Alstine praised Linscomb.

“He’s given us direction and vision and motivation at a time when we have less and less resources,” Van Alstine said. “I’d love to see him be with us longer, but . . . this is really a pressure cooker. I understand that he feels it’s time to do other things.”

Since Linscomb began in 1986 as deputy superintendent for instruction, the Pasadena district has instituted a series of “academies” in high schools that give students exposure to careers in health science, computers, finance and graphic arts.

The district’s innovative hands-on science program, Project Seed, is run in conjunction with Caltech. An early kindergarten program for 4-year-olds serves as a national model for other schools, Linscomb said. Another program that works intensively with black male pupils was begun last year at several elementary schools.

But Linscomb says Pasadena faces worse problems with gangs, crime and school finances than it did when he arrived from the Los Angeles Unified School District. In Los Angeles, he was associate superintendent in charge of instruction for eight years and helped found the DARE anti-drug program with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Pasadena’s gang problem is one faced by all urban school systems, he said. Likewise, declining state and federal funds mean the Pasadena district, which has a budget of about $72 million, will probably face more cuts this year.

Linscomb, who presides over an overwhelmingly minority school district and is African-American, says he has offered to help the board find a successor. The district is 41% Latino, 36% black, 19% Anglo and 4% Asian and other.

“I think it’s primarily important they find a good superintendent, one who’s interested in African-American education, bilingual education, multicultural education, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference what color that person is.”