For Board of Education member Herman G. Hernandez, it's all about timing

Herman G. Hernandez speaks often to youngsters and teens, many of them Latino. He tells a bit about the oscillating arc of his own life and encourages the students to aim high, get involved, study hard and fail, fail, fail.

The sturdy, gregarious Guerneville native and nascent community leader might well recount how his first attempt at college crashed and burned. His parents, Herman J. and Guillermina Hernandez, were determined that, unlike themselves, both their son and their daughter, Daniela, would reap the benefits of advanced education.

“They worked their butts off to make sure I’d go to college,” shares Herman Hernandez the younger.

He graduated from El Molino High in Forestville in 2004, then prepared to enter a university that he and his parents deemed wasn’t too close nor too far away, Sacramento State. He expected to play baseball there.

The big day came and his folks were helping him lug all of his freshman accoutrements into a dormitory room. “And I freaked out,” he says.

Hernandez told his folks he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t make the move to a live-in college 100 miles from home.

“My dad thought I was joking,” he says. His Mexico-born mother, struggling just then with her own anxiety over his leaving the family nest, was incredulous.

“I’d never seen my parents so mad at me,” Hernandez recalls. He doesn’t relish the memory of the long ride home to Guerneville in a car repacked with all the stuff that was to have filled his dorm room.

He’ll tell youngsters whom he seeks to inspire that it simply wasn’t his time to take on the challenge of an out-of-town, four-year college education. He enrolled instead at Santa Rosa Junior College and three years later applied to a school hundreds of miles away, San Diego State.

He says the time was then right and he thrived at SDSU, learning to manage his fear of public speaking, studying business and international conflict resolution and discovering he liked being part of service and fraternal groups.

Today, at 29, Hernandez is an elected member of the Sonoma County Board of Education and managing the campaign by Lynda Hopkins for election to the county Board of Supervisors. In his day job, he raises money, coordinates events and does marketing and outreach for the Santa Rosa-based nonprofit social services agency Community Action Partnership.

Hernandez views himself as someone who can help correct the imbalance of Latinos in leadership positions in Sonoma County and beyond, and he tries to get the sons and daughters of Spanish-speaking immigrants to begin thinking of themselves that way, too.

“I want to start planting the seeds early,” he said.

As he stands before groups of students and shares his own experiences with timing and trial-and-error, Hernandez concedes that only a few years ago he was the last person to be involved in an election campaign or to encourage anyone to step up as a voice for Latinos.

“In high school, I was that guy who thought your vote didn’t matter,” he said. “I had a very negative outlook on politics.”

A couple of things happened to brighten his dim view of the political system.

One was that his father, a longtime Russian River business and civic leader and son of a Salvadoran father and German mother, took him to conversations on the underrepresentation of Latinos in positions of power in the county and state.

Hernandez the elder also introduced his politically ambivalent son to then-Sonoma County Supervisor Mike McGuire, who was elected to the Healdsburg School Board at age 19, to the Healdsburg City Council at 24, to the Board of Supervisors at 30 and to the state Senate at 34.

“He single-handedly inspired me by his story of starting so young,” Hernandez said.

Blown away by McGuire’s energy and zeal for public service, Hernandez took his first step into politics, offering to join the supervisor’s campaign for a second term. That was in 2014; Hernandez was 27.

He was working as the McGuire campaign’s volunteer coordinator when the candidate announced he would instead seek election to the state Senate seat from which Noreen Evans was being termed out.

Hernandez became field director of McGuire’s new and ultimately successful senatorial campaign. That same year, 2014, Hernandez spied his own opportunity for public office.

Jill Kaufman announced she would not seek re-election to the Area 5 seat on the Sonoma County Board of Education. That areas mirrors the county’s 5th District and encompasses the lower Russian River, where Hernandez has lived all his life.

He said he asked McGuire’s advice about running and was told that, win or lose, the attempt would add to his knowledge of campaigning. Hernandez ran for the Board of Education without opposition and late in 2014 was sworn in as the panel’s first Latino.

He said his year and half on the board has been exciting, largely because of the return to school boards of more discretion over spending. In addition to managing Hopkins’ campaign for 5th District supervisor, Hernandez has initiated his own campaign for re-election to a four-year term on the school board.

His interests as a trustee include advocating for greater opportunities for career-track vocational training, for early-childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds and for an ethnic-studies curriculum that provides a more comprehensive view of the roles and contributions of Latinos and Native Americans.

Hernandez believes students are less likely to drop out if they perceive their cultures are included in their studies. “To me, it’s about finding a way to engage these students,” he said.

As he encourages students to aspire and to not fear failing along the way, he reveals a couple of his own ambitions: He wants to earn a master’s in public policy at UC Berkeley, and at some point he’d like to have a place of his own.

At nearly 30, Hernandez lives with his parents in Guerneville. He doesn’t see that as a personal failure, given how hard it is to afford Sonoma County rents while paying off college loans, but as a situation to improve upon when the time is right.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@press?democrat.com.