Turnaround Maestro : Superintendent Breathes New Life Into Newport District

When Mac Bernd moved his belongings into the superintendent’s office last summer, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District was a house divided.

A chorus of parents and teachers were unrelentingly criticizing school officials, who had failed to prevent the district’s budget chief, Stephen A. Wagner, from stealing $4 million from various district accounts. In the fallout of that 1992 scandal, the largest embezzlement in California school history, Supt. John W. Nicoll had resigned, citing poor health. Bernd was hired six months later to begin repairing the damage.

The embezzlement “was really a calamitous event. I think there was a lot of sadness in the district,” Bernd said. By the time the new superintendent moved in, “there was an intense desire to move forward, to start having fun again.”

*

Bernd, 50, who was brought in last summer from Arkansas, has given the 17,000-student district a lift this year with a series of swift, high-profile moves not seen in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa educational circles in a long time. In that past 12 months, he has presided over an administrative shake-up, hired new principals at all four district high schools, helped repair the district’s finances, which were depleted by the embezzlement, and orchestrated a series of successful community meetings that have brought an alienated community back into the fold.

“I think we have accomplished all those things in one year,” said Forrest K. Werner, school board member. “It has been an outstanding turnaround, and Mac was not bashful about taking the ball and running with it.”

Board President Edward H. Decker said: “People here have memories of a time when people in the district were not returning their phone calls. . . . Our previous superintendent was somewhat invisible. But Mac’s accessibility has overwhelmed people, after more than 20 years of not having that.”

Bernd immediately established a reputation for openness. He asked people to call him “Mac.” Before the start of the school year, 2,000 district employees, teachers and administrators assembled in the Edwards theater at Fashion Island Newport Beach for a one-hour pep rally. Bernd considers that his best performance of the year.

*

“Yeah, we filled the whole room. Obviously, people didn’t know me at all,” he said. “We all got together and talked about teaching and learning. It was important--I think there was a degree of acceptance there.”

The first day of school, the superintendent rode the bus with a groggy kindergartner. Later in the year, to the amazement of students attending a pep rally at Corona del Mar High School, Bernd drove his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle onto the floor of the gymnasium. He stole the show at a Costa Mesa High School student rally as well.

“He walked right out there and screamed into the microphone, ‘Are you ready to rock, Costa Mesa High School?’ ” said Clay Stockton, a graduating senior. “Students now actually know who the new superintendent is. . . . You don’t (ordinarily) see kids get excited about seeing an administrator.”

*

To get parents involved, Bernd held a series of community meetings known as “An Evening With Mac,” which culminated in a much-hyped Education Summit last November at Estancia High School. That night, concerned parents told the superintendent which issues, such as quality of teaching and community involvement, should top the district’s list of priorities.

“To have everyone come together . . . was kind of like a big, huge family,” Bernd said. “It was almost as if we were in a big living room. It was amazing.”

*

On the more substantive side, Bernd last December commissioned a controversial audit of the district, which was harshly critical of its management and the seven school board members. That audit was conducted by a team of investigators who leafed through boxes of school documents and spent a week in classrooms just before the Christmas break. Three months later, they produced a 219-page study that heaped criticism on the school board, and the district in general, for micromanaging and having a “limited, fragmented and inadequate” vision of the future and various other deficiencies.

School officials hope to use that criticism to make improvements.

“I am very, very optimistic, even buoyantly optimistic, about all the changes taking place,” said Karen Evarts, an active parent of a high school student. “Rather than being in denial about the problems here in the district, now I feel we’re looking at them straight on and deciding how to go about proposing solutions.”

The district, for the most past, has gotten itself back on track financially. While Wagner is in state prison serving a six-year sentence, the district has balanced its budget for the upcoming year and still managed to sock away about $3 million in reserves. That is the first time that level of cushion has been reached since the 1980s.

All that has been accomplished while the class size has been reduced to a ratio of about 29 students per teacher, down from 31 to 1. The district also hired five teachers to restore the physical education curriculum in the elementary schools.

“That is a blockbuster way to start the new school year,” Decker said.

*

Yet the school district still has an image problem. A team of consultants last spring assessed the district’s ability to raise private donations from local residents and business, and found enough lingering distrust to prevent the district from running a worthwhile fund-raising campaign.

Several school board members, even those who agree with Bernd on most issues, say privately that the superintendent is so anxious to get involved with issues that he sometimes forgets to delegate responsibility.

“If he wants to stay in this 90-mile-per-hour, go-like-hell mode,” Werner said, “he’ll burn the place up.”

Bernd also created bitterness among some school board members when he pushed hard for the curriculum audit.

“None of us had seen a curriculum audit,” said Decker, who did not expect it to be a management audit as well. “We didn’t know what would be in it. Mac missold it to us.”

As a result, some are looking to Bernd to ease back on the throttle a bit this year.

“He is pretty intense when it comes to work,” said Jim de Boom, another board member. “He puts in long days and long hours.”

Bernd said he is prepared to slow down a bit, but still plans to work through the summer without a vacation so that he can help prepare a long-term plan for the district’s future and implement a series of changes dictated by the audit last school year.

“We want to clear the way for teachers to do their jobs,” Bernd said. “I think there is always going to be conflict and problems, but it must not disrupt our focus on teaching and learning.”

Profile: Mac Bernd

Born: Lincoln, Neb.

Lives: Costa Mesa

Age: 50

Occupation: Superintendent, Newport-Mesa Unified School District

Family: Wife, Shelley, and 27-year-old daughter by another marriage

Education: Doctorate in education, 1975, University of Colorado; master’s degree, political science/sociology, 1970, University of Colorado; bachelor’s degree social science/psychology, 1967, University of Northern Colorado

Professional: 1992-93, superintendent of schools, Little Rock School District, Little Rock, Ark.; 1986-92, superintendent of schools, San Marcos Unified School District, San Marcos, Calif.

Hobby: Riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle

How he’ll fix things: “We want to clear the way for teachers to do their jobs. I think there is always going to be conflict and problems, but it must not disrupt our focus on teaching and learning.”

Source: Newport-Mesa Unified School District