There was no denying what was staring back at him in black and white.
Suddenly, the ultimate truth about Dr. Stefan Bean’s life, and his life’s mission, had crystallized.
Now, it wasn’t like it was the first time he’d considered these things. Starting when he was just 14 in front of an audience of 15,000 at a Lutheran church youth conference in Washington, D.C., and continuing to this day, Bean has been giving inspirational speeches. How he, stricken by polio at age 2 and abandoned by his birth mother to the streets of Saignon, overcame language barriers, disability and personal loss. He would go on to become a teacher, then ultimately achieve the role of superintendent of Orange County’s school system, influencing the education of 450,000 students across 28 districts.
You know the kind of up-by-your-bootstraps, overcoming-adversity story about successful people.
He worked hard to learn English as a Vietnamese refugee taken in by a foster family in San Diego, who later adopted him. He suffered numerous agonizing surgeries to deal with polio’s afflictions, which ultimately resulted in him being wheelchair bound. Even though he struggled through elementary school, he turned things around academically and went to USC — where he met the love of his life — and then received his Ph.D from Cal State Fullerton. The father of four kids.
Everybody kept telling Bean he should write a book about his life. A publisher agreed. And that’s when, in working with co-writer Kathy Nash, Ph.D., to finish “Lifted to Lead,” published last fall, he finally understood the real meaning of his very own story.
“I think by putting it on paper glued every principle and value that I had into this moment of understanding,” Bean reflects during an interview in his second-floor Costa Mesa office. To get there, visitors pass a wall bearing a large district symbol, with Bean’s name underneath in big, bold white letters.
But that moment of understanding?
“No one gets there alone, especially me,” Bean says.
“In my keynote [speeches], I’ve been thinking about this metaphor: Many leaders want to be the one to climb that ladder of career and success. But for me, I see that we should be holding that ladder, so others can climb that ladder to success.”
Raised up
Like a lot of people, Bean says that he’d been “writing a book in my head” for a long time. Being appointed as the superintendent finally motivated him to get it all down on paper.
“I said, okay, now we’ve got to write the book. I knew that I wanted to honor all of those people in the book who lived in me,” he says. “My journey is more than a personal story about an individual; it’s actually something that could inspire people and even inform them on life lessons that I’ve learned.”
Throughout the stories Bean tells in “Lifted to Lead,” he reframes the concept of successful leadership as a practice that comes not from a place of superiority, but from mutual support.
“What I discovered through the writing process is that it all culminates in lifting,” he says.
Hence the title of the book. “We had other working titles, but when we read the book, we just saw this theme of ‘lifting.’”
That theme begins quite literally with Bean being part of Operation Babylift at the end of the Vietnam War, an initiative by then-President Gerald R. Ford in April 1975 to evacuate some 3,000 war orphans. Another dramatic survival twist to his already dramatic story: Because of a mix-up, he was bumped from the rescue plane he was initially set to board — only to have that plane crash, killing 138 passengers.
Once Bean saw the metaphor of being lifted by others, he recognized it was a pattern throughout his life: His adoptive parents lifted him, literally and figuratively, throughout childhood. His friends in high school lifted his wheelchair up the stairs so he could get to class. San Diego public school teacher Donald Geisinger, who told the then-mediocre sixth-grade student that he had “the gift of gab” and lifted his sense of himself. (In a full-circle moment, Geisinger would be the one to swear Bean in at his superintendent ceremony in 2024.)
And then there is the story of his wife, Janet, who on their very first date saved Bean’s wheelchair after it rolled down a hill into the Kern River.
As he describes in the book, the next thing he knew, she was running down the river bank, jumping in the water, lifting Bean’s wheelchair out of the current, and lugging it back up to him.
But their happily-ever-after would not last nearly as long as Bean imagined. She died of cancer in 2020, leaving him a widower with four children: Sophia, now age 23; Amelia, 21; Samuel, 18, and Gabriel, 15. The lesson he’s tried to teach his children through their grief, he says, is, “We never move on from a loss, but we can move forward from loss.”
In one of the most emotionally raw and poignant sections of “Lifted to Lead,” he recounts how Janet had initially rejected him when he asked her out, admitting she was worried that because he was in a wheelchair, he wouldn’t be able to take care of her should she ever become sick or too old to get around by herself. The fact that her fear ultimately became a reality “wrapped around me like a chain. … I could not care for her the way I wanted, and the truth crushed me,” he writes in the book.
Even then, he was lifted by support from family and friends, who did what he could not.
“Their presence was not my failure,” he writes. “It was the way it was supposed to be, even if it was hard for me to see it that way. We were blessed.”
From inspiration to action
“Lifted to Lead” does more than recount Bean’s rise from disadvantaged beginnings to an empowered position; it reveals the ideological underpinning of his approach to education.
“There’s a difference between inspiring strength and empowering strength,” Bean notes while recounting how that sixth-grade teacher, “Mr. G,” not only told him that he had the “gift of gab,” but then assigned him to do oral presentations. “The thing about Mr. G is that not only did he inspire that gift within me, he actually empowered it. You have to not only inspire strength in people, but empower the strength of people.”
(Also, one more thing to know about this 55-year-old superintendent: In his spare time, he’s been binging the TV show “Ted Lasso,” the dramedy about a relentlessly optimistic soccer coach who, though haunted by a painful past, turns around a struggling team. Extrapolate from that what you will.)
The one obstacle to all of this he sees? Distrust among people limits what can be accomplished.
“When we’re so divisive like we are right now, we need leaders to build community, and remind people that, yes, we have differences, but there’s so much more than we have in common,” he says.
He points to a state-of-education address he gave earlier this year to a room full of nonprofit leaders, business executives, educators and district leaders. “We had everybody from different parts of the community, with different political viewpoints in that room. I reminded everybody in that room — and I said it was a through line for me — that no one gets there alone. So when we are being divisive, we’re actually being counterintuitive to human nature. Human nature is that we have to do this together rather than apart.”
“I’ve worked really hard to shed this idea that, ‘oh, he’s political’ or ‘he has this agenda,’” says Bean, whose detractors have criticized his support for school choice, defined as a policy of allowing public education funds to be used outside of a student’s assigned neighborhood public schools, including for charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling.
“I mean what I say, and I do what I say. I want to bring people to the table from all walks of life, all political viewpoints, and find common ground in the work that we do. And it’s very simple. In education, the common ground is our kids, our students. The baseline is: What is best for all of our students? At the end of the day, if we’re really, truly here to serve all students, then let’s lift up together.”