Just what a dizzy school district needs -- more spin

It’s too bad Los Angeles Unified School District officials didn’t make the first assignment for their new spin doctors spinning the news that they’ve hired spin doctors.

The district’s fledgling public relations effort stumbled this week, when news leaked out that Supt. David Brewer handed out contracts worth more than $350,000 a year to a team of consultants charged with improving the district’s public image.

Team leader and former Telemundo news director Victor Abalos says he’s a not PR man, but a broker of “communication strategies” for “target audiences” that will help the district get its good news to a disenchanted public.

I’m not going to pile on here. It’s almost too easy to bash a district that graduates barely half of its students, can’t pay its teachers properly and on time, yet seems to think its biggest problem is its poor public image.

I actually think it’s a good idea for a complex organization the size of L.A. Unified to have a solid, intelligent and honest communication strategy -- one that aims to illuminate, not manipulate.

I’m sure we’d all like to see more good news stories, like the choir performing at Disney Hall, the winning Academic Decathlon team, the former engineer with two graduate degrees just named state Teacher of the Year.

But I imagine Mr. Abalos’ target audience will also expect answers to questions like these: Why is it taking so long to fix the payroll system? Why do half the students at some high schools drop out? Whatever happened to the district’s big plans for reform? And where is my tax money going?

Six months ago, Abalos said, he saw the district “like everybody else: this huge bloated bureaucracy that’s failing students.” Now that he’s part of that huge, bloated bureaucracy, his assessment is less harsh.

The district “doesn’t work as well as it should,” he said. “The problem is the kids need to get a better education. . . . But success breeds success. If everybody thinks you’re a failure, why would you want to fight hard for a team that sucks?”

A frenetic fast-talker who peppered his interview with me using street slang and marketing terms, Abalos spent the bulk of his career in newsrooms, leaving the business several years ago to do “social marketing” for nonprofit groups.

He said he applied for the job earlier this year, didn’t hear back for months, then was summoned for an interview. He met Brewer, they “bonded,” and the next morning Abalos was saying yes to his one-year, $178,000 contract. If Abalos does well -- and completes his college degree -- Brewer would like to hire him on staff.

Abalos said his pitch to Brewer was simple: The district’s marketing efforts have been textbook bad. Its website is outdated, its television station underused. There’s too much circling the wagons and too many say-nothing newsletters. “You’ve got 50 parent groups out there, and nobody knows about each other.”

He imagines Los Angeles following the lead of New York City, which is trying to partner with a cellphone company to get free phones, with paid minutes, for high school kids. The phones are considered educational tools; they can be used to download homework assignments. They’re also classroom incentives; the better the students’ grades, the more free minutes they get.

Los Angeles is way behind the curve, he said, in partnering with big companies that have something to sell, money to spend and a willingness to support the district’s educational vision -- once Abalos can tell them what that vision is.

I’m not sure I want a bunch of downloading cellphones in my daughter’s high school class. And I’m hoping Abalos’ vision extends way beyond that.

But I’m also not going to ding the district -- yet -- for trying. I know the bad news is not going to stop.

My colleagues on the education beat are not going to gloss over the payroll debacle, stop calculating dropout statistics or soft-pedal the controversy over impending school reform just because Victor Abalos and his team devise a communications strategy.

I just hope that every now and then Abalos will stop talking and listen, put down his research and head out to one of the 700 campuses in Los Angeles Unified.

That’s where he’ll find the teachers and students who can put into perspective this district’s struggles, humiliations and successes. That’s where I met a principal who spends his own money to charter a bus to take housing project kids on a college tour. That’s where I heard about a middle school teacher who spends three nights each week training students to run the marathon. That’s where I watched math-challenged fourth-graders learn to play chess well enough to win a tournament.

In Abalos’ world that ought to be worth a little corporate love, if not some good publicity.

sandy.banks@latimes.com