Board Selects Rohrer to Head Redondo School District

Beverly Rohrer, deputy superintendent of the Redondo Beach elementary school district, has been named successor to retiring Supt. Nick Parras, who will leave his post in July.

Rohrer, the first woman to head the Redondo Beach City School District, has been a teacher and administrator in the South Bay for three decades. In 1960, after her graduation from USC, she joined the faculty at her alma mater, Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, where she was a teacher, counselor, activities director and finally dean of students.

In 1983, she joined the Redondo Beach school district as assistant superintendent for administrative services. She was promoted in 1986 to deputy superintendent.

Rohrer was appointed Tuesday night by the city’s school trustees, after a search of several months. The vote was 3-2, with board members Val Dombrowski and Bart Swanson dissenting. They later explained that, although the board majority wanted to appoint a superintendent from inside the district’s administration, several candidates had more experience than Rohrer.

Rohrer, who lives in Manhattan Beach with her husband, Don, and two sons, said she is “excited and happy” to be taking over the 4,000-pupil, kindergarten-through-eighth-grade district.

She also lauded retiring superintendent Parras for his “strong leadership” during the past seven years.

Among her priorities, she said, will be a continued emphasis on basic education and an expansion of computer education and other curricula stressing technological literacy.

Parras will retire July 31 after a 38-year career that began when he joined the staff of the then-new Hillcrest School. After serving as assistant principal at Hillcrest and Washington schools, Parras became principal of Madison School for two years, until 1958. In the following 24 years, he served as an assistant business manager, deputy superintendent and acting superintendent before being named superintendent in 1983.

Still unresolved, however, is the longstanding effort by some trustees and parents to create a unified, Redondo Beach-only school system, severing the city’s high school from the South Bay Union High School District, and creating a single kindergarten-through-12th-grade school system.

“I think this community deserves to have its own educational identity,” said Rohrer, who supports unification. However, she and others say a vote on the issue may still be years away.