Leaders will leave positive legacies

A shimmering pool complex at Corona del Mar High School. Science classrooms staffed by expert teachers at every elementary school. A strategic plan that embraces art, technology and school redesign.

When Serene Stokes, Linda Sneen and Tom Egan departed the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board of trustees this month, they left legacies much greater than their names in an archive.

Over the last four years — or, in Stokes’ case, the last dozen — Newport-Mesa’s three outgoing board members have spent many late nights in the boardroom, answered thousands of e-mails, attended countless performances and fundraisers.

At a Dec. 7 meeting, three new trustees — Karen Yelsey, Michael Collier and Walt Davenport — raised their right hands and joined the Newport-Mesa ranks. As the district welcomes the next generation, it says goodbye to three people who guided it through some of its toughest and most prosperous years.

Under Stokes, Sneen and Egan, Newport-Mesa pulled itself up after an embezzlement scandal, passed two expensive bond measures and merged college education with the upper grades. Today, Sunday and Monday, the Daily Pilot salutes the contributions made by Newport-Mesa’s outgoing trustees, each of whom came from a wildly different past.

SERENE STOKES

A CLASSROOM VETERAN

As a board member, Serene Stokes oversaw one of California’s swankest areas, presiding over Corona del Mar and Newport Coast. Her own background, though, was much rougher.

A Chicago native, she moved with her family to East Los Angeles at the age of 3 and attended public school in some of the city’s poorest areas. Working to pay her way through college, she earned a teaching credential from Cal State Los Angeles and took her first teaching job in the early 1950s at a hardscrabble elementary school in Oakland.

“It was a challenge, let’s say that,” Stokes said. “But it really gave me a good background. If you could survive your first year there, you could do anything.”

As she had her three children, Stokes fell out of the workforce for a while but came back as a reading teacher in the Rowland Unified School District. In the mid-1970s, she took a principal job in the Santa Ana Unified School District and stayed there until 1989. By the time she decided to run for the school board in 1994, she had been working as a sales associate for Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, but missed the education world.

She entered Newport-Mesa at a tumultuous time. The year before she joined the board, controversial Supt. John Nicoll resigned, and the district was reeling from embezzlement and a state curriculum audit that faulted it for both poor leadership and inconsistency in the classroom. Shortly after Stokes’ election, Newport-Mesa took another hit when Orange County declared bankruptcy.

As Robert Barbot took over as superintendent and the district composed its first-ever strategic plan, Stokes served on a task force to instate an anti-bullying policy and got Corona del Mar High School certified as a digital campus. While school board president in the late 1990s, she oversaw the opening of Newport Coast Elementary School and the reopening of Eastbluff Elementary School.

Her last year on the board may have been her most fruitful. She served as president when the district passed Measure F, a $282-million bond that seeks to renovate and modernize all Newport-Mesa schools. As a member of the nonprofit CDM Community Aquatics Facilities Foundation, she successfully lobbied the district to fund repairs of the Corona del Mar High pool this year. In September, she negotiated a $2.5-million grant from the Irvine Co. to pay for new elementary science teachers.