Retiring Meadows Principal Will Run for Board

Meadows Elementary’s popular--and sometimes embattled--principal is retiring from the acclaimed alternative school come June. But don’t expect Tim Stephens to disappear from the Conejo Valley Education scene any time soon.

With summer vacation still months away, Stephens on Friday announced his next move: a 1998 run for the school board.

“The fact that I’ll still be in the mix makes the pain of departing less so,” Stephens said in an interview. “That makes it easier to accept the end of my tenure here.” At the blue-and-white elementary school--Ventura County’s only school still in the running for the prestigious National Blue Ribbon award--parents and teachers were disheartened by the news of his retirement.

“Is there tissue handy?” asked a semi-serious Judy Bowers, who teaches first grade at the school. “Tim is well liked and respected, so we’re naturally saddened that he won’t be here. It will be a loss to all of us.”

Selling pizzas as an after-school fundraiser, the Meadows faithful were all asking the same questions: Will their unique program be dismantled in Stephens’ wake? And does the nearly 60-year-old father of one need any campaign volunteers?

A Conejo Valley Unified School District employee since 1972, Stephens decided recently to retire rather than be transferred to another school. By district policy, principals are transferred every seven years to give them a variety of experiences.

Because Meadows made the shift from a traditional elementary to a school employing the “meaning-based learning” philosophy, Stephens was allowed to remain at the campus for 14 years despite the policy.

*

In the shift to meaning-based education--which values experiences over book work and stresses thematic learning over rote memorization--Stephens earned many friends, not to mention a handful of prominent foes.

While backed by parents at his school and a majority of the current school board, Stephens has tangled repeatedly with the school board’s two more conservative trustees--Mildred Lynch and Elaine McKearn, who both favor more traditional teaching methods.

When the school board voted 3 to 2 last June to make the meaning-based learning program permanent after three years as a pilot program, Lynch and McKearn dissented.

The school board seats held by Lynch and McKearn--as well as trustee Richard Newman--are up for grabs in November 1998. Lynch has previously said she would not seek reelection; Newman has not made an official announcement; and McKearn is widely expected to run again.

*

Some Meadows parents and teachers fretted that Lynch and McKearn would attempt to change the school’s course. Neither Lynch nor McKearn could be reached for comment Friday.

While the whole community worked to create the Meadows program, it is strongly associated with Stephens.

“He’s the glue,” Bowers said. “He’s the driving force. He’s got the vision. He’s got the drive . . . “

” . . . Otherwise you don’t go forward,” added Julie Crandall(cq), a second-grade teacher and a Meadows parent.

Coordinating the pizza fund-raiser, parent Mary Franke Baum was a mite worried too.

“We want to continue the program in the same direction it’s going,” she said. “We don’t want to see it changed. Too many people have worked too hard and too long.”

If anyone tried to tinker with Meadows, parents would flood the school board chambers and protest, said parent Starr Baker. “There would be an uprising.”

Trustee Dorothy Beaubien doubts that Meadows will be changed. Stephens, too, said he believed the school district was committed to Meadows, which is a California Distinguished School and is in the running for the nation’s most prestigious award for public schools.

*

“The important thing is to get a solid principal in who is committed to the program,” Stephens said. “It’s not important that I’m not coming back.”

Beaubien, for one, said she welcomed Stephens into the political arena.

“I doubt that Tim Stephens will spend his retirement gardening. He isn’t that type,” she said. “If he does run--great. That’s what I did. I retired from teaching and then, before I knew it, I was on the board.”

With last year’s school board field crowded with Christian conservatives, Stephens said he hopes to give voters another alternative.

“Everyone has to step up and be counted,” he said. “Obviously members of the religious right, they’ve stepped up and they’re being counted. I think the moderates have to step up and be counted too.”

Candidate Stephens, a Westlake resident, is already planning to meet with teachers, parents and administrators for his electoral effort. While he hopes to gather campaign ideas from his would-be constituents, Stephens has placed the first plank in his platform: site-based management,

Each of the district’s 27 schools should be governed by the local community, so that parents and teachers can make one elementary a fundamental school, for example, while another is a performing arts, math or science magnet, he said.

*

Even if his bid proves fruitless, Stephens said he will continue to work in Conejo Valley schools, Meadows among them. After all, his 3-year-old daughter, Megan, will soon be of school age.

“If five years from now this program is still here, still flourishing, and parents, teachers and students are still excited about it . . . that will be my legacy,” he said. “If it’s torn down--dismantled--I guess we could say it wasn’t done well enough.”