As Orange County superintendent of schools, in charge of overseeing 450,000 California students, Stefan Bean carries the weight of the request from his late wife, Janet Soars, to “take care of the kids.”
Born in 1971 in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Bean was abandoned on the streets of Saigon after polio left him paralyzed from the waist down when he was just 2 years old.
He was eventually taken in by an American family that fostered 150 children, many of whom had disabilities of their own, but not before Bean narrowly escaped death during Operation Babylift, an April 1975 mass evacuation of children out of South Vietnam to the United States and other Western nations, as North Vietnamese forces approached Saigon….