5 Novices Vie for El Rancho School Board Seat; 4 Other Slots Open in Fall

Five political novices will be on the ballot Tuesday for the first of five El Rancho Unified School District board seats that are up for grabs this year.

Tuesday’s race will fill the unexpired term of George D. Crook, who retired last winter. There will be no runoff, the candidate with the most votes will win the seat.

In November, board incumbents Maria Aguirre, Mary Eva Gomez, Beatrice Proo and Raul P. Salcido will be up for reelection. Pete A. Ramirez is the only El Rancho board member not facing reelection in 1987.

10,300 Students in District

The El Rancho district, which is 95% Latino, has 10,300 students and a $30-million annual budget. The district runs from the 605 Freeway on the east to Passons Boulevard on the west, and from Whittier Boulevard in the north to Loch Lomond Drive.

El Rancho Supt. Thomas Sakalis describes the district as stable, with a very slight growth rate. Although all the candidates said that classes are larger than they would like to see, Sakalis said that El Rancho is not experiencing the classroom shortage that is plaguing some other districts.

The superintendent said that from his viewpoint, the only real problem facing his district is state funding, which he said is a concern shared by all districts in California.

The five candidates on Tuesday’s ballot, though, have a variety of opinions about the district and what it needs.

The candidates are:

- Cecilia Chavez, 51, who is employed in the South Ranchito Elementary School as a media aide and worked for 11 years as an aide in district classrooms. She is the president of the PTA at El Rancho High School, which her three sons attended.

Chavez said the most pressing problems the district faces are drug abuse and dropouts, and she advocates early intervention to deal with these problems. “By high school, you can only reach a few,” she said. “We lose them by then.” She said these problems can best be solved by getting parents involved and “really working with the kids.”

She said she opposes health clinics on campus dispensing birth control devices, but supports sex education beginning in grade school. From her vantage point in district classrooms, she said, it appears that El Rancho teachers are “generally doing a good job. Overall, I think we have a pretty good school district.”

- Albert Cortez, 26, who is an administrative assistant in the office of state Sen. Joseph Montoya and is a night student at Whittier College. He said his four years experience in Montoya’s office would give him an advantage on the board.

“I have inroads in Sacramento,” he said, “and I’m used to dealing with legislation and budgets. I understand that sort of thing.”

Unlike the other candidates who said they have spent less than a few hundred dollars each on their campaigns, Cortez said he has spent “about $3,000.”

Vocational Education a Major Goal

One of his major goals would be to promote more vocational education, he said. “A lot of kids don’t have the desire to go to college; there’s a lot of emphasis on academics. If I was on the school board, I would definitely want to look into this.”

He cited funding cuts as one of the problems facing the district, but said “We have to work with what we have. It’s natural to complain, but some priorities have to be rearranged.” He did not have any specific proposals for budget cuts.

He said in an interview that he supports sex education in the schools, a change from his position at a candidates’ forum a month ago when he said he believed the primary responsibility for sex education belongs in the home. He also said that he is “not totally opposed” to health clinics on high school campuses dispensing birth control information.

- Lydia Juarez, 41, who described herself as “a homebody” and has a daughter enrolled in El Rancho High School. She said she is running because she believes that the board needed “somebody sensitive to the needs of children and who wants to serve the community.”

“That’s me,” she said. However, she added that winning would be “a little scary.”

The major problem facing the district is a 49% dropout rate for Latino students, she said, which she attributed to teacher attitudes.

“Kids don’t like to be made to feel dumb. You’ve got to get teachers who halfway like the kids,” she said. She said she would like to see the district test teachers and eliminate those who are not up to par. “We should clean house,” she said. “I don’t like to see good money go to lousy teachers.”

Juarez said sex education should be taught in school “as soon as possible,” and children should be taught about AIDS. “You can’t tell if you have kinky relatives (who would expose the children to infection). Little kids should be taught the dangers.”

- Lillian Silva, 53, who has worked in El Rancho High School migrant education classrooms for 2 1/2 years, and before that was an elementary school community liaison for six years. She said she has been volunteering in El Rancho district schools for 21 years, while her four children attended school. Two grandchildren are district students.

“The No. 1 issue is the high percentage of kids who drop out,” she said. “Somewhere along the way we lose them. I am a firm believer in counseling. The patterns show up as early as elementary school, when children start making excuses for not doing homework or missing school.”

She advocates early counseling programs, not only to keep children in school, but to combat drug abuse. She also advocates sex education at all grade levels. At a candidate forum in April, Silva was the only one to advocate dispensing birth control information through campus clinics. Although she said such a procedure might eventually be necessary to help curb teen-age pregnancies, she added that if the issue ever came before the El Rancho school board, she might have to abstain from voting for religious reasons.

Silva said that, if elected, she would keep in touch with the children and schools: “Educators often talk down to people.” She said that is something she would like to change.

“I’ve spent almost 25 years working with schools,” she said. “I know about school problems and school budgets.”

- Irene Sylvest, 59, who is the librarian at Birney Elementary School and president of the PTA at Burke Middle School, where the younger of her two children is enrolled.

She is running for the board, she said, because “I understand what kids need and what teachers need.”

She said she sees no “great, pressing issues” in the district except funding. “I’ve been very pleased with the quality of education in the district,” she said. “I think they’re doing a good job.”

As for her qualifications for the job, she said, “I think I’m honest and intelligent. I’m for the kids. I want the kids to have the best education possible.” She said she supports the new Family Life sex education which is starting in El Rancho schools next fall.

Sylvest said dropout rates are too high everywhere, not just in El Rancho, and she said she would support a program that would promise jobs to students who maintain 90% attendence records and C+ grade averages.

Although the issue of school dropouts has been raised by a number of the candidates, Rip Gowen, the district’s coordinator of child welfare and attendance, said there are a variety of methods of counting dropouts which give different totals.

Attrition Rate Factor

The “high numbers” of dropouts cited by some of the candidates reflect overall attrition rates, he said. And up until this year, attrition rates have simply measured how many children leave a district’s schools.

The attrition rate did not account for children who moved to other school districts or who got their diplomas through adult education. Gowen said the old figures are not very accurate.

Starting this year, the state is requiring schools to use a new accounting method called CBEDS (California Basic Education Data Systems), which takes into account students who transfer to other schools or move out of the area. It is based on students in grades 10, 11 and 12.

Dropout Rate 13%

Using this new method of accounting, the one-year dropout rate in the El Rancho district was 13%, Gowen said. The statewide average CBEDS dropout rate for 1985-86 was 9.1%, according to Jim Fulton of the state Department of Education.

The dropout rate can be translated into an overall attrition rate.

In California last year, 9.5% of all 10th graders dropped out. Of those who made it to the 11th grade, 8.7% more dropped out. Of the remainder, 10.3% more dropped out in their senior year.

While this averages to a 9.1% dropout rate per year, the state projects these figures to mean that, overall, 25% of the students who start high school in California don’t finish school. This is the attrition rate. The old method of accounting showed that 31% of all California students dropped out without graduating, Fulton said.

The last available report on the El Rancho district’s attrition rate was 44%, for 1984-85, according to Norbert Genis, assistant superintendent of Educational Services. These figures are based on the old method of accounting. Genis said that if the figures are adjusted to account for students who moved out of the district, El Rancho probably had an attrition rate of “about 27%-28%.”