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Alumni Hall of Fame Profile:

Mary Barlow is a schools chief who 'gets it'

By California State University, Bakersfield

February 8^th, 2021

This is one in a series of 2021 CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame profiles.

Mary Barlow knows what it’s like to stand in line for food handouts, to tell the bill collectors mom and dad aren’t home, to have the heat turned off and the car in danger of repossession.

She knows because she experienced all those things as a child growing up in a loving but challenged family that moved around a lot and struggled to pay the bills as her father battled mental illness.

It explains the trajectory of her 27 years in education, all in struggling school districts, first as an elementary school teacher in Weldon’s South Fork Union School District, later as an administrator in Kernville, and now as superintendent of the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office.

Along the way, Barlow formed the Kern River Valley Collaborative to address poverty, abuse and addiction issues there. She’s championed the Dream Center, which helps foster youth transition out of the system. She helped launch the Kern Education Pledge, an alliance transforming local education from cradle to career.

And most recently, Barlow has coordinated efforts among Kern County’s 47 school districts to ensure instruction and support services continue amid the pandemic, a mission challenged by high poverty rates among their kids.

“Mary understands that there’s more to education than just reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Tom Corson, executive director of the Kern County Network for Children and a 2019 CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame inductee.

“She understands those are the essentials, but she also knows that if kids are coming to school hungry, they’re not going to learn. She knows if kids are dealing with domestic violence at home, they’re not going to learn. They’re not going to learn if they’re dealing with mental health issues.

“They need support, and she gets it.”

Always a leader

Barlow is the oldest of four girls born to a pressman father and homemaker-turned-retail worker mother who moved the family from Massachusetts to Connecticut to California to Kentucky, then back to the Golden State.

In this circa-1970 photo are Barlow (fourth from the left in yellow) with (left to right): friends Dean and Mona, Barlow’s sister Gina, her sister Trish, and her parents. Her family packed all its belongings from its home in Connecticut into the car and drove to Westminister, Calif., and an older single-wide mobile home. — In this circa-1970 photo are Barlow (fourth from the left in yellow) with (left to right): friends Dean and Mona, Barlow’s sister Gina, her sister Trish, and her parents.

Barlow’s Air Force veteran father was in and out of VA psychiatric hospitals. When he was working, he worked two or three jobs to provide for his wife and daughters. When he wasn’t, the family really struggled.

“So I have this understanding of what it’s like to live in an apartment or a mobile home and to have the heat turned off, to have no furniture, and to have to make a meal out of food that you get going through the donation line,” Barlow said.

Young Mary was always a leader, said her sister Trish Terena. At home she watched out for her younger sisters and supported their mother. In the neighborhood, Barlow organized summer carnivals that featured games, arts and crafts, and treats for sale.

“It brought the kids and the community together,” Terena said, “and I just remember Mary being at the lead of all of that.”

Barlow attended many different schools. At each one she connected with a teacher, bus driver or cafeteria worker who made her feel special, and learned the power of those connections.

“Once I found that one person, I became invested in that school and doing well,” she said.

During her junior year of high school, though, Barlow no longer felt she fit in. She completed the school year and got her GED. At 17 she enrolled in a full class load at Fullerton College while also working full-time, first at Sears and then as one of the youngest people ever hired to work as an account representative at Pacific Bell.

Marriage, her son Tony, divorce and remarriage followed. In 1989, Barlow and her family moved to Kernville so her husband, Steve, could work at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake and she could work in telecommunications in Bakersfield. When Barlow became pregnant with twins Matt and Ryan, she decided to go back to school and retool, and a career in education was born.

`Running at CSUB

While raising three children and working as a waitress, Barlow earned enough credits to enroll at CSUB. She majored in psychology, interested in working with people and understanding her father’s illness better. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1994.

Barlow graduated from CSUB with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1994. She was named outstanding graduating senior in the Psychology Department.

“CSUB really gave me my start,” Barlow said when asked for an Alumni Hall of Fame video what she’s grateful for about CSUB.

“I’m grateful for an affordable education with high quality teachers. I found it opened many opportunities for me and my family and at CSUB I formed personal relationships with the faculty that definitely invested in my success.”

Barlow thought teaching would be a good career for a mother, and a good use of the skills she learned at CSUB. Her first job running a classroom was as a first-grade teacher in Weldon.

Barlow had 18 kids, mostly boys, coming from a primarily agricultural community with a lot of history and pride but also poverty, domestic violence, substance abuse and parents who lacked opportunity to advance. The first thing she did was create a classroom family environment where everyone felt cared for and appreciated.

“I knew if students felt comfortable, they could learn. I did not want them to be anxious or worried about what’s going on at home or whether somebody in the classroom liked them or didn’t like them, or if they had the right shoes,” Barlow said.

Barlow with students in 1997 while teaching third grade in the Kernville Union School District.

Barlow saw incredible need for community intervention — kids committing hate crimes, dropping out of school and wearing shoes held together with duct-tape — and spearheaded formation of the Kern River Valley Collaborative.

It brought together educators, businesspeople, law enforcement and social service workers to find solutions to the community’s problems, including creation of a family resource center that is “still going strong,” Corson said.

“Mary is a master at weaving people from different disciplines together and finding that common goal, accomplishing something big as a group,” he said.

In 1999, Barlow moved from teaching to administration, first as director of children and family services and then as superintendent of the Kernville Union School District. Over her seven years in the top job there, Barlow tried to create a culture of inclusivity that said everyone, teachers and staff alike, had important roles to play in achieving shared goals.

She focused on data collection and research to better understand district problems and find solutions, resulting in more professional development for teachers around specific skillsets. Kernville also secured voter approval for two bond measures on Barlow’s watch that modernized schools and built a new one.

Barlow reads to Richardson Center preschool children on Dr. Seuss’ birthday in 2012.

Barlow became very good at finding revenue to support students, and Kern County Superintendent of Schools Christine Frazier (another CSUB Alumni Hall of Famer) took notice.

KCSOS hired Barlow in 2009 as deputy administrative officer of its Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which helps K-14 schools around the state prevent and resolve financial challenges.

Over the next eight years, Barlow promoted up to assistant superintendent for finance and then associate superintendent. She also earned her doctorate in education from the University of La Verne, from which she’d gotten a master’s degree in 2000.

“I tell students never give up – I achieved my bachelor’s in my 30s, my master’s in my 40s and my doctorate in my 50s,” Barlow said. “I always say persevere — it takes a dedication and commitment to get anything worthwhile done.”

Knowing what it's like

In 2017, Barlow became the Kern County superintendent of schools, arguably the biggest job in Kern County education. The office provides leadership and services to Kern’s 47 school districts, delivers direct instruction to Kern’s most vulnerable student populations, operates programs such as Camp KEEP and the California Living Museum, and facilitates student events and competitions.

On the Kern County Superintendent of Schools’ award-winning “Do the Math” program, teachers help students work out math problems on live television.

When Barlow was assistant and associate superintendent, the Local Control Funding Formula passed, and she had to examine everything the office did and come up with a plan for restructuring and reinventing it. To do so, she brought together the 47 school district superintendents and learned about their changing needs. Together, they developed a plan to restructure her office’s services. As superintendent, she had to then implement the changes.

Her goals were three-fold: reduce achievement gaps, improve technology and increase professional development. One outgrowth was the Kern Education Pledge and the Kern Integrated Data System (KiDS), which allows districts to share real-time student outcome data to inform decisions about what’s best for them, teachers and schools.

The system also provides an electronic file on every student, important in a county with kids who move around a lot and need correct placement in classes and services immediately.

“I was always the new kid, so I know what that’s like to move around and to have people make incorrect assumptions about my abilities,” Barlow said.

Barlow has a lot in common with the children served by Kern County school districts, many of whom are from low-income families who share similar dreams and aspirations that she had as a young student.

Making a pledge

Barlow is also a driving force behind the Kern Education Pledge, a pact among all of Kern County’s 47 school districts and institutions of higher education to help each other teach kids from the time they enter pre-school until they’re earning a quality-of-life salary.

There’s a governing council of local education leaders that sets policy, identifies age-specific goals for kids, and finds resources to meet them. Most importantly there are working groups that develop and implement actions around specific topics such as kindergarten readiness and chronic absenteeism. And there are quarterly “convenings” where community groups review progress and provide feedback.

Key to the effort is sharing data on every student to understand needs, identify trends and predict how each will perform and provide early intervention.

“It’s just been phenomenal,” Barlow said. “The people who do this work, they’re doing it because it’s a calling, they’re doing it because they see great opportunity in the children and families they serve. And they just want to do everything they can to help them.”

Two partners in the Kern Education Pledge: Barlow and CSUB President Lynnette Zelezny.

The partnerships created proved a godsend when the pandemic hit. Barlow used them to create task forces that coordinated COVID-19 response countywide.

“Mary knew our collective response needed to be coordinated and systemic,” said Steve Sanders, her chief-of-staff. “She knew we needed input from districts large, medium and small.”

The districts decided early on that the best thing for kids was to keep schools open as long as possible given that nearly a third lived in poverty, meaning they relied on a lot of support services and lacked technology needed for distance learning.

When closures proved necessary, the districts committed to sharing resources. The Bakersfield City School District, for example, had developed work packets for students to complete at home, and a task force set out to widely distribute them.

“We went out to businesses and print shops, and our own internal print shops, to copy enough packets, and then delivered them by the pallet to schools across 8,100 square miles,” Barlow said. “We made sure every student, K-12, had a packet of work that they could continue to use during this stay-at-home order.”

Another task force, focused on nutrition, used KiDS data to figure out how to continue feeding the 108,000 students who received two to three meals a day from more than 100 sites around Kern County. Others reinvented education and developed and shared digital instructional materials, provided training on new technologies that were accessed across the state, and coordinated the bulk-purchase of computers and wireless connections so students and teachers could transition off paper packets.

“She’s been tireless in addressing all of these issues and encouraging all 47 school districts to collaborate and share best practices so we approach this as a collective effort while also recognizing differences in districts throughout Kern County,” Sanders said. “Mary recognizes that these are all our children regardless of the zip code in which they reside.”

As Kern County schools chief, Barlow has been focused on closing equity gaps among the 190,000 children her office helps serve. Those equity gaps required a coordinated effort to transition to virtual instruction when COVID-19 hit.

Many districts began serving small groups of the most at-risk students in person during the fall and now serve entire grade levels. Many districts are hoping and planning to provide full in-person instruction by spring, but it all depends on how prevalent the virus is in the community and the availability of vaccinations.

She’s excited for students to fully return to the classroom and to capitalize on lessons learned during the pandemic, especially from expanded understanding and use of technology.

Barlow foresees more hybrid inside- and outside-classroom instruction, more individualized educational plans for students, and innovation in the methodologies used to educate students.