Supt. to Retire After 20 Years : Education: Norman R. Brekke will leave behind a legacy of fiscal competence and coolness.

Not far from the front door of the Oxnard School District Office, Supt. Norman R. Brekke sat behind his desk--still amid the fray but gray-haired after leading Ventura County’s largest elementary school district through the turmoil of forced busing and the traumas of explosive growth.

“I’ve always wanted to make sure I was available,” Brekke said of his high visibility at the school headquarters.

On Thursday, Brekke will retire after 36 years in the Oxnard district and 20 as superintendent. At 60, he has never worked professionally for another employer.

As the dean of county school executives, he will leave behind a legacy of fiscal competence, coolness during crisis and innovation in year-round education.

Brekke and his wife, Betty Brekke, plan to move almost immediately to a small ranch near Portland, Oregon, where he will raise llamas and work part-time as a consultant.

It is a change that Brekke has contemplated for years, but a wrenching one.

“It’s going to be a profound emotional experience for me to walk out the door,” Brekke said this week. “It is going to be a very painful experience. I have invested my heart and my soul in this community.”

Brekke, who says his usual work day has been 12 hours long, thinks he has done his part to educate children and to hold together a 13,000-student school district with more than its share of race-based politics.

Calm and self-assured but not arrogant, Brekke is widely admired by colleagues and past opponents alike.

“He deals with facts and sorts them out and produces a solution without a lot of personality and political interference,” said Kent Patterson, an Oxnard assistant superintendent.

That same coolness under pressure was apparent in the early 1970s, when he was first confronted by angry Latino parents demanding more school integration, and then by enraged white parents who wanted the district to fight court-ordered busing.

“He was in an extremely difficult position,” recalled attorney Thomas Malley, who sued the district on behalf of several Latino parents. “He conducted himself with integrity and reasonableness.”

Parent Juan Soria, a plaintiff in the desegregation suit, described Brekke as calm and clever--defusing confrontations between the school board and angry residents. Soria, however, said Brekke’s administrative focus may also have been his shortcoming.

Soria said Brekke was too concerned with putting out administrative fires and too little involved in improving classroom education.

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Brekke himself said he considers his response to rapid enrollment during the 1970s as his crowning accomplishment.

Brekke had just become superintendent in 1974, when an economic crisis hit. Schools were full, enrollment was increasing 500 per year and the district had no money to build new schools.

“We were facing a crisis,” Brekke said.

After a school bond measure failed, the school board directed Brekke to see how year-round education would work in Oxnard. Because they operate 12 months instead of nine, such schools can increase capacity up to 33%. Brekke took the assignment to heart.

Within six years, every Oxnard elementary was on a year-round schedule, and Brekke’s low-cost, quick-action program was being hailed as a national model, said Charles Ballinger, executive director of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education.

“He is one of the most outstanding figures in the field,” Ballinger said. “Norman Brekke was the first superintendent in the nation to determine that there was a cost benefit to taxpayers as well as an educational benefit to students.”

Since then, Brekke has written extensively on year-round education in professional journals and spoken at workshops nationwide, Ballinger said.

Brekke estimates that the district has saved $30 million through year-round education, because it has not built three elementary schools that would otherwise have been required.

Since Brekke took over, the district has grown from 11 schools and 8,900 students to 17 schools and nearly 13,000 students today.

And the ethnicity of those students have changed as rapidly as their numbers. Two decades ago, 34% of the district’s students were white and 53% were Latino. Today 15% are white and 76% are Latino. About 46% of all students in the kindergarten through eight-grade district do not speak English as their native language.

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With this transformation, came racial politics in the form of the desegregation lawsuit and in recent years high-profile tensions among the white and Latino members of the school board.

New plans to bus students from their own neighborhoods across town for racial balance, forced the wholesale scrapping of old enrollment practices.

“It was basically turning the operation of our school district upside down,” he said. “It was probably the most stressful, frustrating time of my career.”

Brekke said his role was not to agree or disagree with busing, but to implement the court order. But philosophically he favored it.

“He worked through that transition with an impressive level of work excellence,” said Jack Fowler, a 21-year trustee. “He was constantly providing the board with extremely well-written and well-prepared reports.”

In recent years, two Latina trustees have chastised the district for not doing enough to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking children. Board tensions, which have sometimes ended in angry exchanges, have flared.

Brekke’s role behind the scenes was as impartial observer, board members say.

“He always seemed to bring us back to the issue at hand,” said Trustee Susan Alvarez.

Brekke will be remembered not only for his administrative skills, but for his humane touch in the classroom, since he spent his first six years after relocating from Oregon to Oxnard as a teacher.

Lydia Martinez, 44, who was in Brekke’s fourth-grade class at McKinna School, said he would do anything for his students. He once took Martinez and five other students to their first live theater performance.

“He knew that we couldn’t afford to pay for the tickets,” Martinez said. “So he not only bought us tickets but he also picked us up at our homes and went to the play with us.”

Oscar Grajeda, 36, said Brekke would buy poor children new shoes.

“He just would go to the store and buy them,” Grajeda said. “He is just very caring.”

For all his Oxnard years, Brekke has maintained a modest demeanor and lifestyle.

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He has lived in the same south Oxnard house for 35 years. He spends time in his rose and iris garden. He has raised five children and remains married to their mother.

“He was a husband, he was a father and then he had his job,” Betty Brekke said. “He had his priorities straight.”

Brekke, who has already sold his house and is heading to Oregon on Tuesday, said he would have not chosen any other place to make a career. But now as he returns to his native Oregon, he also ponders what he will leave behind.

“It is going to be a profound adjustment for me,” Brekke said. “This district is part of my family.”