Wiseburn USD: "The Little District that Could"

Perhaps you have never heard of the Wiseburn Unified School District.  Yet it is the second oldest in the South Bay.  The district, which  encompasses parts of western Hawthorne, Del Aire and eastern El Segundo, officially formed on March 5, 1896, after a group of area parents successfully petitioned the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to form their own district.  Only Redondo Beach USD is older.  In the years since its establishment its boundaries have waxed and waned, but the success of its recent graduates under the leadership of recently retired Superintendent Tom Johnstone--once named Superintendent of the Year by Pepperdine University--has been turning heads in California.   Five public charter schools feed the admissions office of the district's new tri-institutional  Wiseburn-Da Vinci High Schools of Design, Communications and Science.  Housed in a gleaming  $160 million structure transformed from a four-story science lab once owned by Northrop Grumman, the high schools' 72 classrooms are home to 1,350 students.  Dr. Johnstone (Ed.D., Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education, master's degrees from both UCLA and LMU), will explain the district's amazing transformation from being "the little district that could" to an innovative leader in secondary education.  Our speaker, incidentally, is the 2019-20 president of the Rotary Club of Westchester, so you may call him Tom.  Bring a guest.  Tom will be introduced by PDG Greg O'Brien.