Lessons in ‘Moral Absolutes’ End as Lester Finishes School Board Tenure

In June, 1977, Larry Lester attended a meeting at Mira Mesa High School on a proposed integration plan for the San Diego city schools. The theme, he said, was “forced busing, you might as well get used to it.”

Lester wouldn’t get used to it. He went to work organizing Groundswell, a community organization opposed to mandatory busing in the city schools. Small but vocal, the group ultimately won the right to testify in court on the San Diego Unified School District’s long-running integration case. Forced busing never came to the city schools.

But Larry Lester’s anti-minority reputation was born.

Nine years later, as Lester gives up the seat on the district’s school board that he won in 1981, it is a reputation that he has yet to shed.

“He still has racist tendencies,” said the Rev. George Walker Smith, a former school board member and a leader in San Diego’s black community.

“I hate to hang tags on people,” Smith added. But “I think that Larry has some warped opinions. I think basically underneath it all, he cannot perceive that a minority person can function, although you have these Vietnamese and blacks who measure up to any white person.”

“He sets that tone,” said Ernie McCray, another black activist and principal of Fletcher Elementary School. “He’s kept an atmosphere going where people with negative attitudes like his can jump right in there and feel free to go.

“I don’t miss him.”

Others do. Even opponents who have disagreed with virtually everything Lester stands for believe that to dismiss him as a racist is to misunderstand Larry Lester.

“A racist is a person who thinks his own race is superior to all other races and actively becomes involved in keeping other races down,” said Dorothy Smith, the school board’s only black member. “I have never seen that” in Lester, she said.

The racism tag is “too simplistic,” said Kay Davis, a board member who sometimes sided with Lester. “It’s easy when you disagree with a person, you call him a racist and that would (quiet) the person.”

Lester acknowledged that he has heard the whispers of racism during his five years on the school board, and conceded that his Groundswell days were probably the genesis of them. But Lester insists the talk is out of line; that he is colorblind, not anti-minority.

“They’re wrong,” he said. “And I think for the most part they are misguided people who simply don’t want to debate the issues. They want to try to label me as being evil because essentially I disagree with them philosophically.”

Smith countered: “I think, with the history of this country, nobody can be colorblind. In a country that for so long has been influenced by color, and has color as so much a part of its decisions, and has had color as so much a part of its internal conflict, no one can be colorblind.”

San Diego’s history with colorblindness has been tested by ongoing attempts to eradicate what a Superior Court judge identified a decade ago as “racially isolated” schools. After seven years of court-supervised desegregation efforts, the district was freed from direct monitoring in 1984 but is still required to submit an annual report to the court.

The court wasn’t the only monitor of the district’s integration program.

Lester made the district’s integration program one of his primary interests, scrutinizing budgets and demanding justification for race-related programs. In March, 1982, three months after joining the school board, he proposed overhauling the district’s integration rules to allow any student to attend any school he wanted. He lost, 4-1, on that issue, which centered on Chinese-American student Kimberly Sam.

“The principles that he (supported), in the abstract, I could agree with--colorblindness, rewarding merit, allowing individuals to develop,” said Bob Filner, a former school board member who served with Lester.

“My problem was always that . . . the way institutions or history has developed, going with those principles rigidly led you into some things that harmed some people.”

Colleagues believe that commitment to principle defined Lester’s approach to the decisions he had to make as a trustee for the last five years.

He joined the board as an idealist and maintained a rare stance as a public official who declined to compromise, content with enunciating his stand and attempting to influence policy through argument, not horse-trading.

“More than any other person in local office, Larry had a clear set of philosophical ideas and was very consistent,” Filner said. “And therefore you always knew where he was coming from. And he stuck to his beliefs.

“If you define politics as Lyndon Johnson did, as the art of the possible, then he was a failure. If you define it as standing true to your principles, and staying pure, and not being sullied by the political process, then he succeeded.”

A strong believer in “moral absolutes,” Lester said, “Any public body should have people who take a position they believe in, that they are really committed to. I think that sharpens the debate, makes it more meaningful.

“It tends to make people aware of the nature of the issues they are considering. Not that they always agreed with me. Often they didn’t. (But) the issue was more clearly defined because of that.”

Lester’s colleagues said virtually the same thing about him. Because Lester’s positions were so well-reasoned--according to his own brand of logic--other board members were forced to examine their decisions more carefully. Always articulate and well-prepared, Lester added breadth to discussions, injecting elements that might never have been discussed had he not been a trustee.

Lester’s very philosophy was the product of his own study. As a political science student at San Diego State University in the late 1950s, Lester was a dyed-in-the-

wool liberal who walked precincts for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.

Once in the real world, however, Lester became influenced by thinkers like political philosopher Eric Voegelin, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. Today his views are more aligned with people like William F. Buckley, he said.

As a result, Lester was a voice in the wilderness on some of the board’s most publicized decisions, standing alone as the board’s conservative holdout.

In the last year alone, Lester was the dissenter in 4-1 votes to establish a new curriculum on nuclear issues; to allow students with AIDS into city classrooms on a case-by-case basis, and to pass a resolution against apartheid. He abstained from a decision to allow girls to play on boys’ football and wrestling teams, arguing that if such a change were made boys should be allowed to play on girls’ teams.

“All those things generally I would lump under the heading of trying to use the school district as a lever of social reform, to reform society,” Lester said. “That’s not, in my opinion, a proper function of the school district.”

Though such stands earned Lester the enmity of groups that championed those causes, he nonetheless has won strong support for his no-nonsense approach to quality education, his close scrutiny of the district’s budget and his continued insistence that money be poured into the classroom before it is spent on frills.

According to Sue Braun, whom Lester recruited this year to make an unsuccessful bid for his school board seat despite her moderate social views, parents “care most about their own kids. They don’t care about AIDS and health clinics.”

“Those are big global issues and people say, ‘Those are for the other kids in the other neighborhoods. That’s not going to touch me.’ Larry stands for discipline. Larry stands for really teaching kids instead of fooling around in the classroom,” she said.

And many of his constituents did agree with him.

“This is San Diego, and a lot of people think the way he thinks,” said Shu Swift, who has worked for integration of the district through the Carlin integration case. “There is a lot of support for Larry Lester’s kind of thinking.”

An adamant opponent of a proposal this year to open a health clinic that would distribute contraceptives in a city high school, Lester emerged on the winning side of a 3-2 vote.

Lester also led the battle to maintain traditional standards for eligibility to the district’s gifted and talented programs (another stand that caused friction with blacks who believed he was trying to keep them out of upper-level courses). He spoke constantly about the need for academic excellence and higher standards. He opposed the expansion of a district math program that he considered to be mere “rote learning.”

“I think he has fought a noble battle to return some quality to education for all children, every child in the district,” said Carolyn Wood, president of the San Diego Assn. for Gifted Children. “Not just the gifted, but the high achievers, and people who are working under grade level as well.”

He also worked to establish the district’s “property management program,” under which closed schools were to be leased for revenue that would pay for new school construction in other neighborhoods. The program, which met with strong opposition from community members opposed to 99-year leases of the Dana Junior High School in Point Loma and the Farnum Elementary School in Pacific Beach, is on hold.

Putting in 30-35 hours each week in addition to his job as a stockbroker, Lester was known for dedicated service to District B, which runs from Mira Mesa to San Carlos.

“The reason he’s so popular is that he works like crazy for his district,” Braun said, “He takes heat. He stays in his office and returns his phone calls. He doesn’t hide from you. He’ll talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about his views.”

That commitment to constituent services got Lester into his biggest scrape with the school board. Responding to a group of parents’ pleas to intervene in a growing dispute over former Serra Junior-Senior High School Principal Marie Thornton, Lester in March attended a school meeting and personally polled teachers over whether they had lost confidence in Thornton.

The move earned him public rebuke from three board members and Supt. Thomas W. Payzant, who took time out from a board meeting to issue statements criticizing him.

“It was totally counterproductive to trying to build confidence in our site leadership,” board member Kay Davis said at the meeting. “It was totally inappropriate behavior, and I don’t want to be associated with it.”

Black leaders, meanwhile, collected 2,000 signatures on a petition in support of Thornton, who is black. Thornton was transferred this fall to a new post as principal of Gompers Secondary School.

“The parents loved him and the teachers loved him,” Braun said recently. “Larry’s problem is he’s not political. He has no political skills. And the district wanted to do something quietly.”

But Lester thought he was right, and when that is the case, he does not change his mind.

“I felt that my behavior in that case was absolutely exemplary,” he said. “In other words, I did the right thing. I was responsive to my constituents, but yet I was fair to the individuals involved.

“I would do it again the same way.”