Daughter of Migrant Workers Chosen to Head Rio School District : Oxnard: New superintendent says her message to the children will be that ‘education is the ticket out of poverty.’

Forty years ago, Yolanda Benitez was a child who played in dusty fields alongside her migrant-worker parents as they picked plums, strawberries and lemons.

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Her home was a tiny garage that had no running water or toilets.

Now 44, Benitez has just been selected as the new superintendent of the Rio School District in Oxnard, charged with running a school system that serves predominantly Latino students from struggling farm worker families.

“I know these children. I was there,” Benitez said. “And my message to them will be that education is the ticket out of poverty.”

Rio school board members announced Benitez’s appointment to the $82,000-a-year position Thursday night. She is set to step down from her current job as an assistant superintendent in the Hueneme School District to assume the top Rio post July 1, taking over for retiring superintendent Peter D. Rogalsky.

As Ventura County’s first Latina superintendent, Benitez said that her goal at Rio will be to provide a supportive, nurturing environment for the district’s 2,700 students--particularly those from poor families--so that they will have a chance to succeed as she has.

She said she hopes to bring a clinic that offers medical and mental health services to one of Rio’s five campuses so that impoverished students, their parents and residents in the north Oxnard community can receive free or low-cost health care.

And Benitez, who is bilingual, said she plans to make sure that students with limited English skills will be successfully moved from bilingual programs to mainstream English classes. Latinos make up about 70% of Rio’s school enrollment, and 59% of the district’s students are poor enough to receive free or reduced-price lunches.

But her most important job, Benitez said, will be to convince students that they can rise above their hardscrabble backgrounds to succeed in the United States.

“I want my students to know they are the best and they absolutely have the world open to them,” Benitez said. “I don’t care how they look or what handicaps they have.”

Those who know the former high school teacher say she is energetic and passionate about education. And she is well-qualified to take over operations of the district that has four elementary schools and one middle school, said Jeffrey Baarstad, Hueneme’s associate superintendent.

“Yolanda is a very skilled and talented person,” Baarstad said. “It doesn’t matter if she is black, white or brown. But her personal experience with the farm-working community will give her an empathy others cannot have.”

Benitez was born in Santa Paula, but traveled each summer to the San Joaquin Valley with her parents to pick summer crops. When she was 4, her parents divorced and Benitez, her brother and their mother began living in a garage in El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley.

By age 10, Benitez was working two or three hours after school every day sorting walnuts for a nearby ranch, a job she kept until she was 14. Her mother cracked walnuts beside her, dumping them into huge burlap sacks for delivery to markets.

“You could eat as many walnuts as you wanted and I ate a lot,” Benitez said. “To this day, I cannot stand walnuts.”

A bright student, Benitez earned a five-year scholarship to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cal State Los Angeles and quickly began moving up the academic ladder. She has been a teacher in Los Angeles, a principal at San Cayetano School in Fillmore and most recently coordinated educational projects for the Hueneme School District.

Just this week, Benitez completed negotiations with private health officials to bring a full-service, free or reduced-price medical and psychological center to Haycox School in Oxnard, said Hueneme teacher Frances Contreras.

“We’re real proud of her,” Contreras said. “We’re really going to miss her. Everybody’s been in tears around here.”

“I’m a pretty energetic person and I’m pretty good at getting people to spend money on children,” Benitez said. “We have to work with local businesses because the state is not going to give us any more money.”

She is married to Cliff Rodrigues, director of the county school system’s multimedia and bilingual center and a member of the Ventura Unified School District school board. The couple live in Ventura and have three adult children.

Benitez said she is reluctant to focus on “the first Latina” component of her new position, because she feels there is a societal backlash against singling out minority achievement. But she is proud, nonetheless, of her accomplishment.

“Just to be a woman superintendent is difficult enough,” she said. “And put any minority status on it and it becomes even harder.”