Westside Story Newspaper – Online The News of The Empire – Sharing the Quest for Excellence
By Hector Hernandez Jr.
(EMPIRE NEWS NETWORK—ENN)— SAN BERNARDINO, CA— San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools Ted Alejandre and San Bernardino County Board of Education celebrated the opening of their new administrative headquarters, named after San Bernardino educator Dorothy Inghram, on Monday, February 4.
Many in attendance remarked that opening the center, named after California’s first African-American superintendent of schools, was a fitting opening to Black History Month.
The Dorothy Inghram Learning Center, 670 E. Carnegie Drive, San Bernardino, is filled with the latest in audio-visual technology houses County Schools superintendent’s offices, the board of education chambers and offices, the county school’s cyber-security career program and the county’s Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) administration.
According to Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Richard De Nava, once the property was purchased in June 2017 the 18-month remodeling the new facilities was a complex project with a tight timeline.
Each of the project’s goals was met in time thanks to the combined efforts of several departments and partners working as a team, he said.
One of the main goals of moving to new facilities was to enable County Schools to make state-of-the-art facilities and programs available to students of all of the county’s 33 school districts whether their home districts can afford or support those type of advanced programs or not, according to County Board of Education President Hardy Brown II.
Prior to cutting the ribbon, a video as well as several guest speakers including former Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown and San Bernardino City Unified School District Board Member Margaret Hill shared the history of Inghram.
Longtime friends and former students remembered Inghram, who died in 2012 at the age of 106, as a supremely generous woman who believed every kid had potential and who greatly valued reading and libraries. These traits led the city of San Bernardino to name a city library after her in 1977.
Hill, a Highland resident, befriended Ingrham through bowling and the decades-long friendship was further cemented by a shared passion for education.
In a life full of momentous firsts, Inghram was one of the first students to graduate from San Bernardino Valley College (she wrote the school’s alma mater), one of the first African-American students to graduate from the University of Redlands.
She then became the county’s first African-American teacher, served as principal and then superintendent of the one-school Mill Street School District in San Bernardino. She became the state’s first African-American superintendent in 1953.
“She thought children had to have a future and wanted the library to stay open so the children of the community could have a place to go to dream and find out about the world around them,” said Cheryl Brown.
