Ex-Hawthorne Pupil Named District Chief : Education: Donald Brann, the new superintendent of the Wiseburn School District, returns to head his old schools. A homecoming tour brings back memories for him.

When Donald Brann was an apple-cheeked seventh-grader in the mid-1950s, he waged an ambitious campaign for student safety commissioner at Richard Henry Dana School in Hawthorne.

Brann, who had taped a poster with the slogan “Brann is the Man for Safety Commissioner” outside his classroom, was defeated in that student election.

But more than three decades later, the 47-year-old educator has returned to the school triumphant, having just been appointed the new superintendent of the Wiseburn School District.

“I’ve come back to make safety my issue,” Brann joked last week. “I’m going to get that job!”

Brann, whose cheeks are still round but whose hair is starting to gray, told that story Wednesday from the classroom of his seventh-grade teacher, Jack Goode, 69, who still teaches at the school.

Just 20 minutes earlier, Brann and Goode met each other for the first time in 35 years. Goode, tipped off about the visit by an office worker, waited inside his classroom with a colleague. Brann smoothed his hair before opening the door.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Goode exclaimed, reaching out to shake the hand of his former student and new boss. “I remember you. You know, some kids you forget. But you left a big impression on me.”

Trustees unanimously named Brann the new superintendent Tuesday night, awarding him a three-year contract and a $71,000-a-year salary. Brann replaces Clinton Boutwell, who retired for medical reasons in March. Brann will begin working in the district July 1.

Wiseburn is a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade district that serves 1,430 students in two elementary schools and one middle school. Brann inherits a district with a reputation for providing students with a quality education, despite cutbacks in state funding. The district’s $6-million budget could have a funding shortfall as high as $300,000 this year.

To offset declining enrollment that would have brought yet deeper cuts, the district has been issuing permits for children whose parents live outside of the area but work nearby--mostly in support jobs for the aerospace industry. Today, about 20% of the district’s students are on permit.

Brann spent Wednesday on a homecoming tour of Wiseburn’s three campuses, meeting students and bringing large baskets of red apples to teachers and staff members at each school. He said it was overwhelming and “almost like a dream” to wander around his alma mater, which, he noted, has changed remarkably little in the 40 years since he enrolled at the district’s Cabrillo School as a fourth-grader in 1953.

Brann’s tour provoked a medley of memories. He recalled sitting by the window of his seventh-grade classroom during a rainstorm and thinking the drops on the ground resembled dimes.

“I don’t know. Your mind wanders when you’re in the seventh grade,” he said.

Brann, who was a solid A and B student, also recalled writing a 30-page report on Siam, now known as Thailand. The report, he said, had “lots of things padded in.”

“I was a good student,” Brann added. “I had really good handwriting, even though I’m left-handed.”

Not all of the boy’s recollections, however, were matched by what the man encountered. Teachers once seemed to tower over him but now appear decidedly shorter, Brann said. And the open fields he crossed on his way to school as a youngster were long since paved over for the San Diego Freeway.

“California has been so much a state in the fast lane, in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s,” Brann said. “To come back and be able to identify with things you remember as a child is really unusual. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to know it’s still a place I want to be.”

After leaving Wiseburn, Brann enrolled at Hawthorne High. He graduated 43rd in a class of nearly 500 students in 1959.

He received a bachelor’s in business administration at USC, a master’s degree from Cal State Los Angeles and a doctorate in education from USC.

Today, Brann is president and co-founder of the California Small School Districts Assn., a statewide network of more than 600 districts that has a lobbyist in Sacramento. The organization was formed, he said, to provide support to small school districts, where the cost of doing business tends to be higher and administrators often need to wear more than one hat.

For the past 18 months, he has headed the Mother Lode Union Elementary School District in El Dorado County. The semi-rural school district has three campuses and 1,900 students. It is about 40 miles northeast of Sacramento.

Brann started his career in education in 1970 as a teacher at Center Street School in the El Segundo Unified School District. Nine years later, he took a job as principal at the Wilsona Elementary School District in Lancaster. He later became that district’s superintendent. Between 1984 and 1991, he was the top administrator at Old Adobe School District in Petaluma.

Brann’s recent appointment fulfills a long-held dream to return to Wiseburn. Three years ago, he applied for the superintendent’s post at the district, but was rejected in favor of Boutwell, “a seasoned veteran” whose “credentials were a little better,” said Daniel Juarez, Wiseburn School District trustee.

This time around, however, Brann stood out among the field of 40 applicants for the job.

“He’s a real ‘people’ person, very warm, has a very good track record and is very curriculum-oriented,” said trustee Ron Nathanson. “We liked what we saw.”

Brann met his wife, Sari, in a freshman algebra class at Hawthorne High. The two have been married for 26 years and have two daughters, Becky, 19, and Shannon, 22. They will live in a home they own in El Segundo.