By Brad Kava
After two days of candidate interviews Cabrillo College's Board of Trustees recommended 30-year veteran administrator J. Laurel Jones for the top slot vacated by Brian King.
The Board unanimously selected Jones and offered her a contract. A final vote will be held June 10 and if it passes, she will start in mid-July.
A Southern California native, Jones has been president of the 10,000-student Mission College in Santa Clara since 2010. Before that, she was vice president of academic services at Las Positas College in Livermore and vice president of academic affairs at Solano Community College. She began her academic career as an instructor at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, California.
She has also been dean of instruction at Mount San Jacinto College in Riverside County.
According to her Mission College bio, in 1989, her full-time educational career began by teaching English courses as part of the Developmental Educational Program at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. She moved to Northern California in 2005, to become Vice President of Academic Affairs at Solano College.
After earning a BA in English from Taylor University, Indiana, she received an MA in English from California State University at Fullerton, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership from the University of LaVerne.
The Cabrillo Board looked at no in-house candidates for the job, despite the application of Ray Kaupp, a Ph.d business professor who was a vice president at Apple and then launched a multibillion dollar telecommuncations company, BroadWare, before teaching.
Brian King took over as president of the 90,000 student Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento in February and John Hendrickson has been interim president of Cabrillo, which has 15,000 students.
In her public interview, Jones told a story about her nephew who had legal problems and ended up at Cabrillo and then moved on to Santa Clara University, according to this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
"I want to thank Cabrillo," Jones said. "If you can change people's lives like that, you're doing something right."
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
