By Ana Gomez Salcido 
As Escondido Union School District Superintendent Luis Ibarra grew up in East Los Angeles he faced many barriers to be able to succeed in school, the only place where he felt safe. Today, Ibarra wants to help build a more accessible education system.
“I lived in an area that was gang territory and I have memories of gang members gathering on Fridays in front of my house. At midnight we were all woken up by gun fire, and our parents hid us for cover until it cleared up and then we went back to bed,” Ibarra said. “That’s why I got involved with school because I felt really comfortable at school; school felt like a safe place.”
Ibarra was born the fifth of seven children to a Tijuana family where college wasn’t in the vocabulary. At a young age, Ibarra migrated with his family to the United States to pursue a better life.
“My parents migrated to the United States for the American dream to provide a better life to their family, they just didn’t realize that education was part of it,” Ibarra said. “We all got good grades and they were very proud of us, but there was never a conversation about going to college or continuing our education.”
When little Luis was just in the third-grade, he was inspired to become an educator by his teacher Ms. Diaz.
“She made learning so much fun and exciting, and I just knew back then that teaching was what I wanted to do,” Ibarra said. “She was a really good teacher, and good role model. We all knew she cared.”
One of the fond memories Ibarra has of Ms. Diaz is that she took the entire class to a cooking center every Friday and showed the kids how to cook.
“I would go home and my parents took me shopping and I would recreate what I learned for the whole family,” Ibarra said. “I was learning something new. When I became a third grade teacher that’s what I did, I taught cooking in my class and the kids loved it.”
It wasn’t easy for Ibarra to graduate from CSU San Bernardino as a Liberal Studies major to become a teacher.
“It was quite challenging for me to actually get into college,” Ibarra shared. My parents were a great support system, and they were always very proud of me, but going to college was very foreign for them.”
“It wasn’t until I was in high school that my counselors told me I had to take the SAT. So I had to come up with the money to pay for the SAT,” Ibarra told La Prensa San Diego. “Luckily there were some scholarships at school that helped me to pay the SAT fees.”
To get into college, Ibarra also needed more resources and the education system was a foreign subject for his stay-at-home mother and his father who worked as a carpenter.
“I also needed money for college application fees and my parents didn’t know why I needed to pay for those. They understood it would pay off but it was hard for my parents to come up with that money so I got a part-time job to start paying my college expenses especially for applying to college,” Ibarra said.
“I also still didn’t know how I was going to pay for college so the school and the counselors helped me to get connected with financial aid. However, there was another struggle, the forms that I needed my parents to fill out, which meant that I needed to fill them out,” Ibarra explained. “I never stopped and I never gave up. It was through the help from I received from my school that I got accepted at CSU San Bernardino.”
“If it wasn’t for the help I received in school, I wouldn’t made it to college and I would have to just get a job,” Ibarra mentioned.
Ibarra was the second of his siblings to finish high school, but the first to graduate from college.
“It’s very hard to maneuver the public school system and even more difficult to maneuver college systems; that’s when parents give up which is why we need to make college more accessible to our families,” said the Escondido Union School District superintendent.
Ibarra mentioned that he recently joined other local school district superintendents and met the dean and students from the University of San Diego with the purpose of having a more accessible college system to the families.
“I’m excited to be partnering with USD to find out what barriers for students are,” Ibarra said. “We want to be able to get the students through the doors and to support them when they get to college.”
After Ibarra graduated from college, he started working as a teacher in the Rialto Union School District and after five years he moved to the Victor Elementary School District where he got his first job as a principal. Ibarra was later recruited to the Oceanside School District where he was a principal, director, and ultimately became the assistant superintendent, before assuming his position at the Escondido Uniunion School District.
“I always ask myself what drove me. I was just lucky that I had wonderful teachers in my life. My other siblingsweren’t this lucky,” Ibarra said. “I always knew I had the potential, my siblings also wanted it but didn’t know how to do it.”
After his life experience, Ibarra says that as a superintendent he plans to create a system of the educational process so families can work with teachers and community partners to help their kids to succeed.