Races for 2 School Posts a Battle Over Backgrounds

With a handful of relatively obscure issues confronting voters in the two San Diego city school board races this year, personal background and qualifications may be the biggest differences in the candidates.

In the District B race to replace retiring Trustee Larry Lester, voters will choose between Del Cerro homemaker Sue Braun, who touts her years of volunteer service in the schools, and Mira Mesa Sheriff’s Capt. Jim Roache, who believes his skills as commander of the County Jail downtown and outsider perspective make him the better choice.

In District C, 32-year teacher and Bay Park resident John de Beck is attacking the record of incumbent Kay Davis, a Point Loma homemaker who is running on her accomplishments as trustee for the last five years.

All four candidates believe that a short list of issues will be their major concerns if they win election to the $18,000-a-year post on the five-member San Diego Unified School District board.

Though their positions on those issues vary somewhat, each wants to begin drug and alcohol education earlier; each is concerned with continuing advances or shoring up deficiencies in the overall quality of education; each wants to use vacant parcels of district land or strips of excess land at schools to raise revenue for school construction and rehabilitation.

What they think of each other is another matter.

“One of the reasons I started to run was because I saw (Roache) running,” said Braun, who is seeking to represent the section of the school district that runs from Mira Mesa to San Carlos. “I think his background is jails, jails and jails. He’s a law enforcement person. I don’t know why he’s running for school board.”

A 51-year-old mother of three with a master’s degree in social work, Braun said her 23 years of activity in the city schools give her a familiarity with education issues that Roache lacks. She founded the Patrick Henry High Academic Booster Club and worked on the district’s committee for gifted and talented students and its integration task force.

Braun said she will devote full-time attention to the school board, something Roache cannot do. “I don’t think the citizens in electing him are going to get their money’s worth,” she said.

But Roache, a 41-year-old father of two, said that his schedule as commander of the jail allows him to put in the necessary hours as trustee. While holding down full-time law enforcement jobs, Roache said, he has earned an associate degree, a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in business administration and a law degree.

“I have been putting in that many hours outside my job for many, many years and still maintained a very, very credible performance record,” he said.

Roache set up the county’s jail camp in Descanso six years ago and has commanded the downtown jail for two years. He said he has acquired skills that Braun does not have.

“When you’re talking about policy-making for an organization (the school district) with a $420-million budget, with 10,000 employees, with 155 educational institutions, it requires some business, practical, everyday problem-solving skills,” he said.

Roache believes his outsider’s perspective is needed on a school board dominated by trustees with longstanding connections to schools. He promised to “challenge, query (and) question programs, concepts and ideas that others in education might take for granted.”

In District C, which stretches from Point Loma to Linda Vista, Davis is running a classic incumbent’s campaign.

As a political unknown in 1981, Davis spent $80,000 on a campaign that included six separate brochures and a full-time political consultant. This year she has raised just $17,000 to spend on one brochure and a one-day-per-month consultant. She is not walking precincts, something De Beck hopes 200 volunteers will soon be doing with him.

“This time, I’m running--for better or worse--on what I think is the outstanding job I’ve done. Take me or leave me,” Davis said.

Davis, a 41-year-old mother of three, credits herself with starting the district’s Adopt-a-School program, under which 117 city schools are now aided by businesses and other organizations. She said she was integral in raising overall standards at schools, including the rule that a student must have a 2.0 grade-point average to participate in extracurricular activities.

Davis said she is the only trustee to have visited all 155 schools and returns any phone call within 48 hours “95% of the time.”

De Beck is trying to pick that record apart. He is hammering away at Davis’ support for a school district plan to lease the former Dana Junior High School--which is in her district--and other vacant school sites to developers for 99 years.

The so-called “property management plan” was designed to raise money to build and rehabilitate schools in other neighborhoods, but it sparked two lawsuits and is now bogged down in discussions with city leaders.

Davis “has bought into the school district’s property management program instead of examining other ways to raise building revenue,” De Beck asserted. He has linked her to developers, in part because her husband is president of American Assets Inc., a multimillion-dollar development firm.

De Beck said that he opposes leases of more than 15 years for any of the five vacant schools and would not allow the buildings to be razed.

“I endorse (property management) in a limited way,” he said. “I don’t believe we should ever lease property in the long term.”

He wants the district to sell or lease the acreage where it now parks buses overnight, saying that the buses could be housed at Dana, at least temporarily.

Davis defended her property management stand, saying that “we have got to look at what’s good for the district, which many times politicians don’t do.”

De Beck, a 56-year-old father of seven, claims that Davis began to suggest selling off excess strips of school land after he proposed it. Davis said she has repeatedly asked administrators to check into that plan, but it has not been done.

De Beck also criticized Davis for her faith in those administrators, who he said did not do their jobs when they adopted a $1.1-million computerized bus-routing program that left thousands of children stranded at bus stops last year. The program was later abandoned.

“Kay believes the school management. She believes everything she hears from (Supt. Tom) Payzant, she believes everything she gets from Payzant. She believes the reports,” he said.

“And I don’t believe them, because I’ve seen how far off they are from the facts. I don’t believe a lot of them.”

Davis is painting De Beck as a candidate of the San Diego Teachers Assn., which endorsed him and has promised assistance with his campaign. De Beck was the union’s treasurer before resigning to run for trustee.

“I don’t see myself as a single-issue, tunnel-visioned candidate as I see him. (He is) coming from the teacher-only perspective,” she said.

“That’s plain ridiculous,” De Beck responded. “My first loyalty is to the community. If I had to make a choice between what’s right for teachers and what’s right for the community, I’d be for the community every time.”