School leader announces retirement - Newport Mesa Unified School ...

School leader announces retirement
District Supt. Robert Barbot plans to step down in June, colleagues learned
at the end of Tuesday's board meeting.
By Michael Miller
(Published: November 24, 2005)
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.