When Mendiburu first arrived on campus at CSUB, he was immediately struck by its sense of community.
“All the students interacted with each other, the professors, the faculty — everybody was engaged,” he said. “Every time you went on campus, you felt like you were welcome. It was like a family. What I really liked about Cal State Bakersfield was the sense of that community, which it still has to this day.”
Mendiburu said the teacher education program at CSUB helped him strengthen his connections not only with the campus but with the wider community, especially when he had the opportunity to teach in schools.
“The faculty really encouraged us to be part of the community,” he said. “When we went into our student teaching phase, they really encouraged us to be part of the classroom, to not feel like you're just there to fill time, but to be part of it and embrace the students. That really allowed me to flourish and become a teacher.”
Mendiburu took those experiences to heart when he joined the Rosedale Union School District. Both as a teacher and as an administrator, it was important to him that students’ learning experience and wellbeing was the first priority.
“It does not matter what position you hold in the school system; we’re all there for students, and if you are in the field of education and you don't think about student success and what we can do to help our students, then you're in the wrong business,” he said. “It's really easy to forget why you're in the business sometimes. We have to always remember that students are our future, and if we don't invest the time now in them, then we won't see tomorrow's leaders.”
RUSD’s previous superintendent, Jamie Henderson, supervised Mendiburu while he was working at the district office as the assistant superintendent of business services. He said he was impressed by Mendiburu’s calm, professional demeanor and his willingness to tackle any challenge that came his way.
When Henderson decided to retire and the time came for the school board to interview applicants for the job, Henderson said it was clear after Mendiburu’s interview that he was the right person to lead the district.
“John showed himself at every level. I knew he was so well prepared,” he said. “After John's interview, I went in and I told the board, ‘I respect all five of you. You're my bosses, but quite frankly, if you don't hire that man, you’re nuts.’ You could just tell John got it. He embraced taking on the challenge of the job of superintendent. You could tell that John was going to learn and that he would exercise good judgment.”
Mendiburu led significant projects during his tenure as superintendent, including campus modernizations and the construction of new gyms at the district’s middle schools.
“Schools are very important as a safe place for students to come and feel like they're welcome, and it was important to us as a district,” he said. “We did what we needed to do to not only provide for our students but to give them the opportunities for different educational pathways as well.”
To help determine what the needs were and what improvements were most critical, Mendiburu worked with staff to collect and examine student data.
“Data tells us everything that we need to know about a student, and not just one piece of data — multiple data points to really start making the improvements that we needed for our students,” he said. “I was very excited to see the student success in Rosedale. I was very prideful of the fact that any member of the faculty who joined our district were there for students where we put children first in whatever we did.”
While Mendiburu held the top position in the district, he believes all faculty and staff are vital to its success.
“Everybody's important in the school system, whether you're the superintendent, a teacher, the bus driver or an instructional aide,” he said. “Everybody is on the same playing field. We're all there to help the students and the families who came through our district.”
As his secretary, Clanton was able to witness Mendiburu’s leadership firsthand. She said she was impressed by his ability to juggle a variety of challenges facing the district and how he would thoughtfully consider any concern that was brought to him, regardless of how small it seemed.
“Challenges would come and we would experience different issues throughout the years working together, but John's approach was always the same,” she said. “He would never shy away from an issue. He would never dismiss anyone as if their concern wasn’t important. Regardless of the challenge, he welcomed it, faced it head-on and tried everything he could do to make the situation better.”
Having seen how Mendiburu successfully led RUSD after his retirement, Henderson feels that his intuition about him has been validated.
“His message was very clear to his principals and to the staff that having students succeed, having students be proficient in what they’re learning is the reason parents send their children to school, and John made good on that,” he said.
Mendiburu may no longer be the superintendent, but Clanton said he’s had a significant impact on the Rosedale Union School District, including faculty and staff.
“When I run into a Rosedale employee, often the first thing out of their mouth is ‘how is John?’ and I think that that really says so much about the value that was placed on his superintendency,” she said. “There have been wonderful leaders before him, and a wonderful leader after him, but there’s a uniqueness to John. There’s a little something special that everyone picks up on. He's a unicorn. I've been around a lot of school administrators and district administrators, and he's one in a million.”
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