‘The only thing that she’s changed is her hair color.’--a community volunteer : Weintraub, Old and New: Conservative Image Blurs

High above Wilshire Boulevard, in the private dining room of Republican financier David Murdock’s Regency Club, a group of prosperous conservatives paid $125 each to attend a noontime fund-raiser for Los Angeles school board member Roberta Weintraub.

A few weeks later, Weintraub received an endorsement for Tuesday’s election from another well-heeled group that usually endorses candidates with liberal stands--the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), an influential political organization concerned with promoting gay rights.

“She was right on all of the issues that we are concerned with,” said Marsha Kwalwasser, chairwoman of MECLA’s Political Action Committee. “She was right on women’s issues and she was right on the rights of gay teachers.”

Change in Views

Is it possible for 49-year-old Roberta Weintraub, a Republican who was once one of the most vocal leaders in Los Angeles’ anti-busing movement, to be the darling of both liberal and conservative interests?

Although still a staunch conservative, Weintraub said as she campaigns for a second full term of office that her six years on the Los Angeles school board have profoundly changed her views.

What about that stridently outspoken, curly red-headed leader of the anti-busing movement, the one who helped engineer the first successful recall of a Los Angeles school board member? The one who called the only black member of the school board a “bitch” on a live radio broadcast?

She no longer exists, Weintraub said.

In her place is someone quieter in both talk and appearance, a svelte blonde with a modified new-wave haircut and a weekly television show.

This Roberta Weintraub represents schools with minority enrollments well above 50%, a fact that she said has expanded her vision on education and the problems that face the Los Angeles district.

This Roberta Weintraub has acted as a mentor for minority administrators moving up the district’s bureaucracy. She has fought to improve the nutritional quality of the meals served as part of government-subsidized breakfast and lunch programs because, “When you are feeding kids two of their major meals a day, it is extremely important that nutrition is taken into account.”

Makes No Apologies

And she has championed such “liberal” causes as giving women equal pay for comparable jobs and an affirmative action program to place women in half the high school principal spots in the district.

However, Weintraub makes no apologies on how she conducted herself during the vitriolic years of mandatory busing. She said she doubts whether the “new Roberta Weintraub” would conduct herself differently if the district were once again faced with court-ordered, mandatory reassignment of students.

“I got too caught up emotionally in that issue to tell you that I would do it all that much differently,” she said. Then, after a thoughtful, long pause, she added, “Yes, there would be a different form of behavior, but I would still be very emotionally involved, and that always prohibits you from doing the perfect job.”

That hesitancy to renounce her actions during the rancorous busing years, along with what some see as her tendency to favor predominantly white schools in Studio City and Sherman Oaks, make some think that the “new Roberta” is little more than a facade.

“The only thing that she’s changed is her hair color,” said one Valley community volunteer who works closely with schools in Weintraub’s East Valley district.

Telling Them Apart

This contradiction in her image helps make Weintraub, one of the most visible school board members, somewhat of an enigma.

It is difficult to tell whether Weintraub is the board member who opponent Mary Louise Longoria says has “grown tired and disinterested in the job” or, as Weintraub herself says, one who wants to remain on the school board for four more years because “the job is so varied and interesting” and because “you can cut through bureaucracy for a lot of people and make things happen.”

Weintraub has lived in close-knit Los Angeles Jewish communities all of her life. She graduated from Fairfax High School during the years when that school’s enrollment was almost 100% Jewish and went on to UCLA, where she won a degree in education with a political science minor.

At 26, she married physician Lewis Weintraub, and 21 years ago they moved to the San Fernando Valley. The Weintraubs have two almost-grown sons.

Role as Democrat

Politics always seemed to be a part of Weintraub’s life, although in the early days it was for the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. Before she was married, she was the office manager for the California Democratic Central Committee. She spent a brief time in New York, where she worked as a secretary and fund-raiser for a reform movement within that state’s Democratic Party.

Weintraub became politicized and switched to the GOP during California’s medical malpractice crisis in the mid-1970s, an issue that hit home in the Weintraub family. It was a time when a historic number of lawsuits were being lodged against doctors and the insurance premiums that doctors had to pay were at record highs. In response, doctors were reducing their caseloads and eliminating parts of their practices to circumvent paying high premiums.

Weintraub led several lobbying forays to Sacramento to get legislative relief from the spiraling insurance rates. Her first taste of media attention came when she led a group of doctors’ wives into Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s office for a sit-in.

Insulated Years

When Weintraub looks back on her involvement in the malpractice crisis and her later efforts to obtain passage of tax-cutting Proposition 13, one of the things she remembers is how insulated she was from persons of other races and ethnic groups. She says candidly that, until she joined the school board in 1979, she had known few non-Jews.

“But when I got on the board, then came the full spectrum,” Weintraub said. “I discovered what the city was really like.”

She added: “You can’t grow up in an all-white, Jewish world and say that you understand what’s going on in the rest of the world. You are going to make a lot of mistakes when you first leave that insular existence, because you are not going to be sensitive to anyone around you.”

Weintraub said this is “absolutely” what happened to her when she was thrust into a leadership role in the anti-busing movement.

1st Run at Job

Her first attempt to join the school board in 1977 ended in defeat. In 1979, she spearheaded the recall of Howard Miller, the president of the board who, critics said, misrepresented his position on mandatory busing during his 1977 campaign for the board. That recall was successful, and Weintraub was elected to fill Miller’s spot.

Weintraub joined then-board members Bobbi Fiedler and Richard Ferraro in the creation of a board anti-busing coalition, although they lacked a majority on the seven-member board. When Tom Bartman, then the Bustop attorney, was elected in 1980, the anti-busing forces finally had that majority.

But the deeply divided board could not agree on a president. In the end, they turned to the politically inexperienced Weintraub as a compromise, hoping that she would set a calming tone for the often emotional board meetings that dealt with busing.

Often Lost Control

Instead, Weintraub often lost control of the meetings and was known for frequently blurting out comments that seemed to be insensitive to some who were making presentations before the board.

“She arrived in a tidal wave and rode it to the dismay of those of us who would have liked to have seen her calm the emotions,” said Kathleen Brown, a board member at the time who is now living in New York. “I always found her very easy to talk to, very easy to disagree with, especially on matters other than those coming before the board. I did not find her to be as thoughtful and reflective during those early years on many of the volatile matters, such as the integration issue.”

Memories Blurred

Weintraub’s memories of these bitter years on the board are “blurred.”

“I don’t have any demarcation points, because I don’t think we accomplished very much educationally,” she said. Busing “had become such a divisive subject that nobody was rational. The sides had hardened down to such a point that nobody was talking to one another.

“My life was threatened on many occasions. I had guards on me. My kids had threats made toward them. I was catapulted from relative obscurity to being on the news four or five nights a week. I probably had more experiences in my first two years on the board than most politicians get in a lifetime.”

When the mandatory desegregation program ended in 1981, Weintraub said, the board changed from being a “board of transportation” to a “board of education.”

Changes in District

Things also changed in Weintraub’s district.

Many of the schools were becoming predominantly minority--mainly Latino--and crowded. The 11 Valley schools on year-round session because of crowding are all in the East Valley.

At the same time, many of the schools in predominantly white neighborhoods north and south of Ventura Boulevard were underenrolled. A decline in the birth rate and an increase in the number of students who were sent to private schools because of busing contributed to the empty classrooms.

Weintraub said that her experiences in trying to meet the needs of her changing constituencies has changed her.

“You have to go with the times, change with them and make sure that you are looking out for the community’s needs,” Weintraub said.

Controversial Decision

Although her fellow board members say that Weintraub is quieter and more apt to listen to all sides on a controversial issue, some are not so sure that she has changed all that much.

For example, many pointed to Weintraub’s decision last fall on what school would host the meeting of the board’s Community Affairs Committee, which meets at a different school once every three months in order to make board members more accessible to parents and teachers. The board member whose district the committee is going to visit is allowed to choose at which school the committee is to meet.

When it was the East Valley member’s turn to host the committee, Weintraub selected Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, in an all-white, middle-class neighborhood. The choice angered many.

“If she wanted to be responsive to her constituents, we should have met at a year-round school or a school where the majority of the students are minority,” said a fellow board member.

“The committee should have met at San Fernando High or Pacoima Junior High,” said an East Valley PTA member who attended the Birmingham High meeting. “Those are schools that are representative of the East Valley. Having members of the school board meeting at schools like these would have meant a lot to parents in these communities.”

Playing to the Media

Some of Weintraub’s fellow board members are also a little put off by how she plays to the media. They say she often makes policy motions--such as automatic expulsion for possession of weapons on school grounds--that grab headlines and television time but do little to change actual district policy.

Weintraub makes no apologies for trying to use the media to her advantage.

“I have a sense of what plays and what doesn’t play,” she said. “There is no other way for me to communicate with the people in my district. This city is just too big.”

Whether there is a new Roberta Weintraub or just the same old Roberta Weintraub, the veteran school board member said she knows that she will never be able to please everyone or have everyone like her.

“I know there are a lot of people who simply don’t like me,” she said. “I guess there’s this image of me that was formed and re-formed during my first two years on the board. It is indelibly imprinted because of the amount of publicity I received during those years.

“Whatever that image was, for some people it is never going to change. I’ll never be able to reach the hard-core, anti-Weintraub person. I think my goal is to reach the person who’s not quite sure.”