New Beginning for Mission

The prolonged and sometimes contentious search process is history now. Texas educator Adriana Barrera will start work July 1 as the new president of Mission College. She deserves to be greeted with open minds. And Mission College most certainly deserves a fresh start.

Barrera’s experience seems well-suited to Mission College. As the former president of El Paso Community College, she oversaw a largely Latino student body; 70% of Mission students are Latino. Barrera built off-site learning centers in some of El Paso’s poorest areas; Mission’s northeast location is one of the Valley’s most impoverished.

The El Paso college was larger, at 18,000 students, but Mission’s 7,000-student enrollment is expected to double in the next few years. And here again Barrera’s background is valuable: She helped expand the El Paso campus, working with community residents to help find the space to do so. Failure to expand cost the last Mission president his job.

Barrera’s support of ethnic studies and the value she sees in understanding a person’s roots and history should be a source of pride for Mission students. Her commitment to democratic and inclusive decision-making should win faculty members. And her experience working with a fractious board of trustees should, well, inoculate her to Los Angeles politics.

In 1998, the El Paso trustees declined to renew Barrera’s contract after she’d served for four years. Members of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees appear to have looked into that decision and favored Barrera in the dispute; one El Paso trustee, it turned out, was later convicted of embezzlement and fraud.

Before selecting Barrera, the Los Angeles board invited her and three other finalists to address a public forum. Such openness helped reestablish the board’s credibility, tested when trustees rejected finalists recommended by an earlier campus and community search committee. The board was within its right to do so, but its action caused a rift that was slow to mend.

The northeast Valley college has far too many needs--and is far too critical to its community’s success--to have its supporters divided. With a largely new board, a new district chancellor, committed neighbors and, now, a new president, Mission College stands ready to remove that pesky adjective “beleaguered” from its name.