Student advocate Navarro dies at 81
Inland Empire activist spent 3 decades fighting for students’ rights, confronted elected officials
Inland Empire activist and student advocate Gil Navarro has died.
Navarro, 81, died Saturday at St. Bernardine Medical Center in San Bernardino, according to his family.
Although he was a Navy veteran, Navarro had worked at the corporate office for Carl’s Jr. and for IBM, owned a taxes and bookkeeping business and a mailbox business and was a notary. But he is best known for his advocacy work.
The longtime San Bernardino resident, who previously lived in Riverside, spent the past three decades holding public school districts and other local government agencies accountable across the Inland Empire. Though he often pushed school districts on policy or economic issues, he was most often seen fighting for the rights of individual students.
“My eldest brother was the first one to get in trouble” in 1990, said his son, Joe Navarro, who is now president of the Jurupa school board. “Some kid handed him some sunglasses that didn’t belong to them, and they tried to expel my brother for it.”
Gil sprang into action, successfully keeping his son from being expelled by the Riverside Unified School District. Word spread in the community and other families reached out with their own stories of what they and Navarro saw as school districts running roughshod over families, often ones without a strong command of English or the resources to push back against the system.
“He just saw some of the injustices some of these kids were facing,” Joe Navarro said. “Little things like that just culminated into him helping.”
Soon, Gil Navarro became a regular at school board meetings across the Inland Empire, alternately scolding for how policy was being implemented and encouraging officials to look into alternatives they might not have considered.
And he would show up in the company of families with children in trouble, helping them navigate the school disciplinary system, using local office supply stores or Jack-in-the-box restaurants as offices to meet with parents.
“It’s so sad that such a wonderful person had to go through this,” San Bernardino mother Elvia Herrera said Wednesday. “He was a very nice person. He helped me a lot with my girls and we’re going to miss him a lot.”
Gil Navarro also worked to help students get back on track academically, taking them on college tours and helping them with the financial aid process.
“That’s what he always believed in: a higher education,” Joe Navarro said. “‘College, college, college,’ that’s all I ever heard from him when I was in high school.”
When Joe Navarro announced his father’s death on Facebook, he received more than 100 comments.
“I heard the word ‘mentor’ at least 50 times,” he said. “He was a father figure for a lot of kids who didn’t have a father figure.”
Gil Navarro repeatedly ran for local offices himself and made two runs for the state Assem
bly. He won a seat on the San Bernardino County school board in 2006, but a judge forced him to step down in 2014 after he was elected to the board of the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District. Gil Navarro later ran into trouble with the state’s campaign finance watchdog agency for leaving open the legal defense fund he had opened to help pay for his legal battle.
But he remained defiant and vowed to stay engaged in advocating for students.
“Rest assured, my advocacy will never be silenced,” he wrote in an op-ed published in The Sun before his ouster. “It is easier to build students now than to repair adults later.”
At the time of his death, Gil was a member of the San Bernardino County Behavioral Health board. He served on the commission since 2021 and was vice chair for the past two years.
“Commissioner Navarro’s contributions to our community through his passion for behavioral health have been invaluable, and his presence will be greatly missed,” department spokesperson Miranda Canseco-ochoa wrote in a Monday email. “Our heartfelt thoughts are with his loved ones, colleagues, and all those who were impacted by his compassion and commitment. Commissioner Gill Navarro’s legacy of service will always be remembered.”
Gil Navarro helped push his son to run for the Jurupa Unified School District board. He wouldn’t come to Jurupa school board meetings out of respect for his son, Joe Navarro said. But that didn’t mean he left his son or the district off the hook. He’d just call him directly with feedback on what he thought the district should be doing differently.
“Once he started doing advocacy, that became his purpose in life,” Joe Navarro said. “You have some people retire and then stop. My dad would have passed right away if he’d retired.”
Gil Navarro is survived by his five children and eight grandchildren. A memorial has not yet been scheduled.
The family has set up a Gofundme page to help defray funeral costs and to help pay, they hope, for a memorial monument to him somewhere in San Bernardino.