OXNARD : School Board Makes Choice for Top Post

The Oxnard Union High School District’s five-month search for a new superintendent ended Wednesday night when the board named the head of a small Stanislaus County high school district to its top job.

Ian C. Kirkpatrick, 48, accepted the $87,000-a-year post left vacant with the July 1 departure of Bob Cash.

Kirkpatrick, who assumes the post full time on Oct. 8, had been superintendent of the Oakdale Joint Union High School District for the past five years.

“I hope to become an important cog in the wheel,” Kirkpatrick said.

The Oxnard district, with six high schools and 11,000 students, has a student body nearly four times larger and far more ethnically diverse than Oakdale, whose three high schools enrolled 2,400 students this year. Minority students compose 65% of Oxnard’s student population, compared with 35% in Oakdale.

“Migrant, bilingual and bicultural education is something we’ll be working on as often as possible,” said Kirkpatrick, a former social studies teacher and track coach.

District trustees launched their search for a new superintendent in March when Carter announced that he would be stepping down. He left the post he held for 10 years to take a job as superintendent of the Santa Clara Unified School District in Northern California.

Trustees paid $12,000 to an assistant director of the California School Board Assn. to help find a successor. The search yielded nine finalists from a field of 50 applicants that included an associate dean of USC’s School of Education and superintendents of the Glendale Unified and Berkeley Unified School districts.

The trustees interviewed all finalists before settling on Kirkatrick. Before offering him the job last week, trustees visited with educators and board members in his 440-square-mile district in Northern California.

“The words we kept hearing were ‘hard-working, integrity, ethical and conservative,’ ” Trustee Jean B. Daily said.