Hollister resident Krystal Lomanto grew up riding horses, driving tractors and helping her father with cattle before she turned to a career in education. Lomanto, 49, spent more than half her life at San Benito High School as a student, teacher, coach and principal before she took her current position as the superintendent for the San Benito County Office of Education.
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Hollister resident Krystal Lomanto grew up riding horses, driving tractors and helping her father with cattle before she turned to a career in education.
“I am a country girl and I’m proud of that, and the work ethic that comes with it has probably helped me be successful today,” she said.
Lomanto, 49, spent more than half her life at San Benito High School as a student, teacher, coach and principal before she took her current position as the superintendent for the San Benito County Office of Education.
She now oversees 11 districts and almost 11,000 students, many coming from the nearly 3,000-pupil San Benito High School campus where she previously worked.
Lomanto stepped into her new office in January. Her immediate goals for the county are to help districts implement new state Common Core standards along with the new Local Control and Accountability Plans, state-mandated outlines detailing a district’s goals and budget plans over several years. Her longer-term goals include increasing collaboration and communication, holding more educational workshops, and celebrating the districts that make up this county.
“The biggest difference is kids are not on site, so that’s probably my most difficult challenge because students are my passion,” she said, as she reflected on her new office.
As part of rolling out her new goals, Lomanto had the county office run two workshops it hasn’t run in years—one about the Brown Act, which governs open meetings, and a second one explaining how the governor’s budget affects county education.
Lomanto also plans to start a county office of education Facebook page to keep the public updated on school news. This month, the office plans to start releasing a monthly newsletter, she said.
While the educator’s belief in hard work came from her father, she discovered a love of learning through her mother.
“My mom worked at Spring Grove School for many years,” Lomanto said. “She was a school librarian. The educational background and the teaching—I think I really got that from my mother.”
Lomanto came to the education field indirectly in college, when she kept choosing jobs that involved students as she worked to help pay for school. When Lomanto left the county to study at the California State University, Fresno, she had plans to study physical therapy but she coached, tutored and substitute taught to pay bills.
“I really gravitated toward youth,” she said. “I was doing a lot of side jobs that dealt with teaching.”
She graduated as a kinesiology major, then added a teaching credential and accepted a job at the “small, country” Caruthers High School, south of Fresno.
In rural Caruthers, she taught five courses: math, career development, English language development and physical education. When she wasn’t in the classroom, the young teacher was coaching softball.
“It was busy,” Lomanto said.
Lomanto enjoyed teaching but a connection in rural San Benito County kept calling her back to her first home. She was in love with a boy named Sammy Lomanto she’d first met in elementary school. In 1990, she became engaged to Lomanto, who had built a career for himself farming walnuts in San Benito County.
“So my job moved and his walnuts did not, and that’s how I moved back into the community,” she said.
Lomanto traded one rural teaching job for another and got to work teaching and coaching at San Benito High School.
Now retired educator Mike Robustelli, who was Lomanto’s U.S. history teacher during her days as a student on campus, remembers Lomanto “agonized” about going into administration, but he had no doubt even when she was a youngster that she would grow up to do great things.
“I knew she’d be successful,” he said. “I just wasn’t aware of what endeavor she was going to select for her life.”
When Lomanto became the principal of San Benito High School, Robustelli was the interim superintendent and became her mentor. He remembers the qualities that made Lomanto successful, first as a student and then later in life.
“She was focused, energetic and industrious, I’d say,” Robustelli said. “She never lost those qualities, even as a teacher.”
Lomanto’s days as principal at the high school came with some memorable challenges including the shooting-related death of student Genevieve Destefanis off campus in 2011, a bomb threat that attracted FBI to the campus in 2012 and the rallying of the student body around Jose Rocha, who learned he had life-threatening leukemia in 2014.
For Lomanto, the campus with its grand arch over the main doors to the administration building will always be a second home. A first-generation college student, Lomanto continues to push others to pursue the higher education she came to love.
“My mom and dad did not go to college,” she said. “They have high school diplomas, but my mom felt education was important and pushed that with all of us.”
