Kevin Garcia

By Nicole Krueger

Kevin Garcia started his new job as director of purchasing for Fontana Unified School District on a Monday. By Thursday night, he had received instructions to inform his staff not to come into school the next day because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Luckily, I had immediately exchanged cell phone numbers with everybody,” he recalls. Next came the scramble for 40,000 laptops to get students connected and learning online. Competing with other districts for limited devices was “like the wild, wild West,” but his team pulled through.

On graduation day, while high school seniors across the nation were celebrating their big day virtually, Fontana graduates lined up in their cars to receive their diplomas in a COVID-safe vehicle procession at the California Speedway, complete with a vintage car show and a livestream.

“We didn’t know how we were going to pull it off. We had one week to do it,” Garcia says of the massive inter-departmental effort and vendor cooperation it took to plan the ceremony. “But these students had dealt with a lot of adversity. They’d lost their prom. We wanted to be able to do something to recognize them. It takes a village, and everyone stepped up.”

Although he was relatively new to the job, Garcia had spent years developing the teamwork skills and vendor relationships necessary to pull off an event like a socially distanced graduation ceremony during a pandemic. Growing up in Redlands, where his aunt was the high school secretary and many of his friends had family members working within the district, he saw firsthand how school communities operate – and what they’re capable of.

“Coming up through middle school and high school, I remember really connecting with my teachers and seeing the compassion they had for us,” says Garcia, now the program manager for procurement and warehouse services for the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. “I saw how the adults in our community came together to support us, like when I was playing sports and I would see them come out and put up a new fence for the baseball field or bleachers for the football games.”

Their dedication inspired him to pursue a career in education. At 17 he started working in the Redlands Unified School District’s maintenance and operations shop, and in college he studied to become a teacher, while spending his summers subbing as a night custodian for the district.

After taking a couple of student teaching classes, however, he realized he didn’t want to be cooped up in a classroom all day. So he decided to get a business degree and go into purchasing instead.

“I fell in love with it,” he says. “In purchasing, anything you’re buying comes through us. We work with everybody, at the end of the day.”

Coming up from the facilities side of school business, Garcia understands how something as simple as a fresh coat of paint or a new marquee can give students and teachers a renewed sense of community and pride in their school. And in his current role at the county level, he’s passionate about supporting every district as much as he can – even if it means answering the 100 emails that are already sitting in his inbox at 8 a.m.

That sense of community also carries over into his service as Purchasing Professional Council Chair for CASBO’s Eastern Section.

“With CASBO, you get to meet your vendors and co-workers, people both in your county and outside of your county. You start meeting people you’ve only spoken to on the phone and now you can put a face to the name,” says Garcia, adding that relationships are a key component of his job.

“I literally started from the bottom. It’s always my goal to make sure everyone feels welcomed and appreciated for what they do.” z z z

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