A LIFE'S WORK: After 39 years with the Manteca Unified School District, popular Sierra High principal Rick Arucan, shown above in his office this week, will retire at the end of this school year.

MANTECA — Growing up poor in gang-riddled south Stockton, Rick Arucan never imagined he would be a high school principal. All he knew was that he didn’t want to be poor anymore.

The son of a Filipino farm laborer and a Cajun cannery worker from Louisiana, both of whom spoke English as a second language, Arucan remembers learning the value of an education at an early age.

“You needed extra money, you got up at 4 in the morning and went and you went (to pick asparagus) with my father,” recalled Arucan, 60. “At the time I hated it, but in retrospect, it was probably the best lesson I ever learned — if I don’t go to school, I’ll be doing this the rest of my life.”

So Arucan did go to school, first to Stockton’s Edison High, where, under his parents’ watchful eye, he dodged gangbangers on street corners, and then to Redwoods University for a year before transferring to University of the Pacific.

Arucan was getting ready to go to law school when an education professor suggested he take an internship at Manteca’s East Union High School. He listened — and, 39 years later, the rest is history.

“I loved going to work. It sounds corny, but I really, really loved it,” he said. “There was something about working with adolescents that was just intriguing to me … They change so quickly. They can be three different people in two weeks.”

Arucan spent 24 years as a social science teacher, football and baseball coach, and assistant principal at East Union, before moving to Sierra High 15 years ago to become that school’s first principal.

Now, after 39 years with the school district, Arucan will retire at the end of the school year. He announced his plans at an emergency staff meeting last month.

“I announced it in about 30 seconds and then there was dead silence,” Arucan said. “Then they all stood up and started clapping, and I totally lost it emotionally.”

Arucan brought with him to Sierra teaching philosophies that have changed the way the school works. There are no desks at the school — only tables, to encourage what Arucan calls “cooperative learning.” Teachers are asked to do group work to encourage a flow of ideas.

And nine years ago, the school was the first in the district to offer a block schedule, now a model for other schools in the district.

Although he’s leaving school, Arucan isn’t hanging up his teaching skills just yet. He will continue to work part-time for the Association of California School Administrators.