School leader announces retirement

District Supt. Robert Barbot plans to step down in June, colleagues learned at the end of Tuesday’s board meeting. Robert Barbot, the superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District since 1998, announced Tuesday that he will retire at the end of this school year.

At the end of Tuesday’s school board meeting, president Serene Stokes read a letter from Barbot while the superintendent sat quietly beside her. In the one-page letter, Barbot said he would depart after June 30 and would spend the next seven months helping find his replacement.

“Students have (and in my 37 years of experience have always had) tremendous needs and challenges,” the letter read. “In the role of educator, you never know for sure just what impact you have had on helping students with these needs and challenges. I hope and pray that my impact has been positive.”

The announcement from Barbot, a superintendent heralded throughout the district, was a bittersweet event. Just an hour earlier, the school board had officially declared the passage of Measure F, the $282-million school bond that is one of Barbot’s largest undertakings since joining the school district.

“We celebrated tonight, and now we’re losing a person really precious to our district,” Stokes told the board.

After the meeting, Barbot, 59, spoke at length about his tenure with Newport-Mesa and his decision to retire. When he joined the district, he had planned to serve for five years, but he stayed longer to pursue his goals of improving curriculum and renovating campuses.

With the adoption of two strategic plans and two bond measures, Barbot said, he felt he’d met his obligations.

“This is a 16-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job,” he explained. “It’s exciting work, but it does take your whole life.”

He said that after retirement, he planned to move to Lake Tahoe and volunteer for the Salvation Army and a number of environmental groups. First, however, he would fulfill a promise to his family by taking six months off work altogether.

Newport-Mesa educators expressed sadness about Barbot’s departure but said they had heard rumors about it for some time. Some of his closest colleagues praised him for his drive as well as his empathy for teachers and other employees.

“He came in the same year as I did, and he has been a fantastic asset to the district and community,” said Phil D’Agostino, a history teacher and the advisor of the Student Political Action Committee at Newport Harbor High School. “I don’t know that there is a superintendent who is as personable and as connected to the minutiae of what goes on in the district as he has been. There are lots of superintendents who get caught up in the larger vision stuff, but he always took time to be part of the smaller stuff as well.”

Jane Garland, the spokeswoman for Newport-Mesa, called Barbot “the finest superintendent” she’d ever worked with.

Board member Dana Black said Barbot’s greatest achievement was the creation of the two strategic plans in 1999 and 2004, which have served as a blueprint for the bond measures and other programs.

“For me, as a parent and a community member, he definitely spoke my language,” she said. “He’s done everything that he said he would do, and the main thing is engaging the community.”

Barbot, a longtime champion of English-learner students, started life as one himself. He was born in Puerto Rico in 1946, the third child of an American naval officer and his wife. His name as it appears on his birth certificate, with his mother’s surname attached to the end, is Roberto Juan Barbot de la Caso de Garland.

When he was 8, Barbot moved with his family to California and anglicized his name. He spoke almost no English upon arriving in the United States but became proficient at school. He lived with his parents, brother and two sisters in a housing project in East Los Angeles.

Although his parents had college backgrounds, Barbot’s father worked as a machinist and cleaned offices in the evenings, and his mother worked in a factory.

Barbot’s parents instilled the value of education in their children early.

“It’s not who people think you are; it’s who you are,” Barbot said. “That’s what they’d tell us.”

After graduating from Excelsior High School in Norwalk, where he served as student body president, Barbot went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Cal State Fullerton. He later earned graduate degrees at Chapman University and USC, and a doctorate at the University of La Verne.

Before coming to Newport-Mesa, he had served as superintendent of the Carpinteria Unified and Chico Unified school districts. He beat out 50 other candidates for the Newport-Mesa job when the school board chose him unanimously in June 1998.

When Barbot took the reins of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, the district had recently suffered an embezzlement scandal and had been hit by the Orange County bankruptcy of the mid-1990s. In addition, a wave of retirements caused Barbot to spend much of his first months in office hiring new employees.

“I knew it was going to be a challenge, but I also knew the community wanted to do some good things,” Barbot said. “I had a lot of admiration for the board.”

The school board will hold a meeting Monday at the district office to discuss the superintendent search process. The meeting starts at 10 a.m. and is open to the public.

20051124hk39efkfDON LEACH / DAILY PILOT(LA)Newport-Mesa school district Supt. Robert Barbot announced his retirement Tuesday.