Schools Chief Brings ‘Magic Touch’

From the school district headquarters here, the road winds southwest out of town, crosses the Rio Grande and disappears in the pecan groves that extend as far as the border.

It took Jesse Gonzales half a century to travel this 10-mile stretch of highway, to go from son of migrant farm workers to superintendent of the community’s schools. He spent another dozen years transforming the district into what many consider a desert island of excellence.

This month, Gonzales left behind the familiar shade of the pecan trees for one of the country’s most difficult jobs in education: superintendent of the Compton Unified School District. In December, he will take command of the district as it regains local control after the most extensive state takeover in California history.

“I’m not sure there’s been a challenge like this before,” Gonzales said. “So it’s fair to ask whether, at this point in my life, I can handle it.”

Why would anyone think of taking on Compton, much less a 64-year-old man with a bleeding ulcer and a doctor advising retirement? The top seat will be hot even by the standards of someone who loves spicy food and wears three-piece suits in triple-digit temperatures.

Compton school board members have no record of governance. Local politicians have made careers of sabotaging school reformers, and voters have refused to pass bond measures that educators deemed badly needed. And in spite of the return to local control, the state Department of Education has appointed a trustee who can overrule financial decisions.

Why, facing all of that, would Gonzales leave Las Cruces, where he is as cherished a part of the landscape as the Organ Mountains? Even his critics on the community’s school board, which has not always bent to his will, say he is the strongest superintendent in a century.

“As far as the people of Las Cruces are concerned,” school district athletic director Bump Elliott said of his diminutive, graying boss, “Jesse Gonzales is 6-foot-2 and has jet black hair.”

Educators who know Gonzales best think that his tenure in Compton will be short. Gonzales allows that he is committed only for the three years of his contract.

“I expect him to return here before too long,” said Las Cruces school board President Mary Tucker.

Gonzales and his wife are not selling their Las Cruces home on a quiet street north of town. There is a pecan tree in the yard.

Placed in Foster Home After Family Tragedies

When Jesse Gonzales was a boy, not yet 10, he would sit under pecan trees with a .22-caliber rifle. He would imagine he was Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. And he would shoot crows.

The seventh of 13 children, Gonzales was born to Mexican farmhands on Stahmann Farms, the world’s largest family-owned pecan farm. When he was 6, his father was shot to death by a close friend--Jesse’s godfather--during a poker game. His mother, Soledad Luna, soon took ill with tuberculosis, and Jesse was placed in a foster home.

When Jesse turned 13, he and his family reunited and settled in Hobbs, a mostly white town in southeast New Mexico. His English was poor. He fought with fellow students who called him “pepper belly” and worse.

In 1956, he became the first Latino to graduate from Hobbs High School.

He delivered mail for a time, married a high school senior named Patsy Andrews and enrolled at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. On his first college paper, a teacher scrawled: “Almost Illiterate.”

To make ends meet, he drove a bus for the school district that he would one day run.

Gonzales earned his bachelor’s degree in 1964 and tried law school. By then he had two children and couldn’t afford to go full time. He returned to Hobbs to become a teacher, but the district wouldn’t hire him. It was, he believes, because of his Mexican ancestry.

The Gonzales family moved to California, where he intended to teach by day and go to law school at night. He never made it to law school.

He got a job as a Spanish and history teacher at Edgewood Junior High School in La Puente. Students made fun of his cowboy boots and near-Texas twang, but his origins added to his mystique. Over the years, teaching softened the farmhand’s rough edges; Gonzales began wearing suits and cleaned up his language.

At night, he earned a master’s degree in school administration from Cal State Fullerton. He channeled anger over his poor schooling into energy for his new teaching career.

In 1975, Gonzales was named principal of Bassett High School in La Puente. In five years there, he redesigned the reading curriculum, reduced absenteeism and contended with a superintendent he described as meddling. He promised himself he would always give principals room if he ever had a school district of his own.

“It was obvious that he was going to be more than a principal one day,” said Betty Wells, a longtime counselor at Bassett. “He had that magic touch with people that great politicians have.”

It took time to get there. He went back to the Hobbs district for six years to be personnel director “for the wrong reasons,” Gonzales said. “To prove that a Mexican could do it.”

In 1987, he landed his first superintendency, in Bernalillo, N.M.

Two years later, the Las Cruces superintendency came open. The board wanted a woman. But at a party for finalists, Gonzales impressed some board members with his knowledge of local geography. They did not realize he had been born under the pecan trees.

Political Sense Rarely Fails Him

Though a school board appointee, Gonzales is a politician. He often stops his car just to shake hands. In Las Cruces, he and his wife were at every high school basketball game and could be seen country and western dancing at local nightspots. (“He’s a dancing fool,” said middle school Principal Nyeta Fields).

Gonzales’ charm helped him modernize the traditional school system in this isolated town of 74,267, an hour north of El Paso. Since weathering an attempt to fire him in 1990--fueled by two board members who thought he was too brash--Gonzales’ political sense has rarely failed him. In making changes, he typically used what school board member Gene Gant called “the Texas two-step”: Announce a new program with far-off goals, then force dissenters into a compromise that got him more than halfway there.

Take Gonzales’ proposal six years ago to adopt school uniforms. Parents fiercely objected. One community group accused him of using uniforms to promote one-world government. So Gonzales proposed a trial run at one elementary school. To sell the idea, he helped put together a fashion show with uniform-wearing students arriving by limousine. Half of Las Cruces’ schools now have uniform policies.

Gonzales also courted parents, even those critical of him, by putting them on committees to draft wish lists for bond issues. His perfect record of passing bond measures--four for four--paved the way for what state education officials say is New Mexico’s most ambitious school building campaign.

During his 12 years in office, Las Cruces built a new school each year. Using a private foundation to solicit extra funds, the district built a 12,500-seat stadium for high school football and track.

“Jesse Gonzales is the modern builder of the Las Cruces public schools,” said Tucker, the school board president.

In recent years, Gonzales’ run of triumphs--three new magnet schools, new athletic programs in middle and elementary schools, a tougher reading curriculum--sparked a backlash. Even some of his friends said he held too much sway. Board members accused him of coddling bad administrators and principals, to whom he delegated broad authority. A taxpayers group said he did not devote as much care to pruning back programs as he did to launching them.

“As a politician, he was incredibly successful,” said school board member Leonel Briseno. “The other side of that coin is that he can talk out of both sides of his mouth.”

Gonzales said that though he was “probably spoiled” by his political successes, the district’s results speak for themselves. Las Cruces students now score above state and national averages on standardized tests--unusually high for a district with a Latino majority and predominantly poor. The pass rate on high school competency tests--65% in 1989--is now about 94%.

Jeff Wilson, a parent who had home-schooled his children, put his son into Mayfield High School a few years ago. “Because we felt we could, because of the job Jesse had done,” Wilson said.

Smooth Ride Roughens With New School Board

Word of Gonzales’ success long ago reached recruiters from other school districts, but he usually put them off. In January, the Las Cruces school board extended his contract through summer 2004.

But after February’s school board election, Gonzales’ smooth ride roughened. Last year, as permitted under New Mexico law, the Las Cruces board declined to renew its collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union. Union officials responded by backing a slate of candidates who took three seats on the five-member board.

Gonzales’ former aides said the new board members challenged routine matters, such as approving minutes and renewing principals’ contracts. One new board member, the father of the union chief, took a desk in the school headquarters and interrupted staffers with questions, the aides said. The board member denies it.

Board members, in turn, complained that Gonzales and his staff were not accurate in responses to queries.

Whatever the case, Gonzales’ ulcer, which had bothered him in the past, began to bleed.

“Jesse felt he wouldn’t be able to gain the trust of the board,” said Tucker, a Gonzales ally.

Gonzales insists the board turmoil had nothing to do with his departure. He says that after 12 years, he was ready for a new challenge.

Compton was looking for a turnaround artist. With a $20-million deficit and some of the lowest test scores in the state, the local school board was stripped of all control in 1993. There has been no superintendent since, so this hiring is key in a return to local control.

On June 9, Gonzales flew to Los Angeles to meet with board members and community leaders who vetted him and three other candidates. According to evaluation forms filled out by the interviewers, he was easily the first choice. “Hire if you can,” wrote former Compton Police Chief Hourie Taylor. Another community activist, hearing Gonzales talk about the new Las Cruces board, marveled at the polite nature of that community’s disagreements compared to the vitriol in Compton. “Why would he want to leave his present job?” the activist wrote.

A week after the interview, a delegation of board members traveled to Las Cruces to offer Gonzales the job. He agreed after his pay offer was increased by $10,000 to a salary of $165,000.

It was the end of a difficult week for Gonzales. His brother had a heart attack. Gonzales visited his own doctor, who strongly urged him to retire.

On the morning of June 22, Gonzales faxed a letter to Compton: “I must acknowledge that my age and related health concerns may impact my level of performance, and I would be doing the district a great injustice by accepting the position.”

That was news in Las Cruces, where Gonzales didn’t seem to have slowed down. “He’s always dancing,” said school board member Jeanette Dickerson.

Gonzales quietly told friends that he had bailed out because of confusion over the Compton superintendent’s role as the state restored local control.

Compton board members urged him to reconsider, and state education officials reassured him. Two weeks later, Gonzales sent word that he would be willing to take the job. The Compton board immediately hired him.

In Las Cruces, the news brought a deluge of pleas for him to stay. School staffers and at least one board member gave Gonzales news clippings detailing the horrors of the Compton district. Business leaders asked if there was anything they could do to keep him.

“I prayed that he would stay,” said Gene Gant, one of the new board members. “He taught this city how you build a school district. No matter what the immediate issues had been, none of us wanted such a person to leave.”

Gonzales told associates that “there is no bigger challenge in the country,” Tucker said. Friends say he also reassured them he would be back after his three-year contract in Compton expires.

As the news sunk in, Gonzales spent August being feted at a dozen events all over Las Cruces. At one, he fought back tears, unable to speak more than a few words. “This is really my home,” he said.