Mayor Has a New Plan to Give Schools a Boost

In another use of his office to help schools, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley offered Tuesday to allow four paid hours off a year to city employees who are parents to confer with teachers or do volunteer work at schools and child-care centers.

The program, which was warmly received by school officials, would also let 500 city employees a year take two hours off each week to volunteer in schools provided they also give up two hours of their own time. This provision would not be limited to parents.

The city’s personnel chief, John J. Driscoll, estimated that there are 18,000 parents of school-age children in the city’s employ who could take advantage of the offer, which Bradley aides described as an unprecedented fringe benefit for municipal workers.

As in April, when he offered to use city funds to pay for after-school activities at all elementary campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Bradley portrayed the announcement as a major boost to youngsters.

Bradley said educators agree that schools work better when parents get involved, but many parents cannot afford to take time off to visit with teachers or help out in classrooms, Bradley said. The city will set an example for corporations to follow, he said.

“We think it’s a great idea,” Bradley said.

This is the second initiative related to schools to come out of Bradley’s third-floor office suite in City Hall in recent months. In April, as the key feature of his State-of-the-City speech, Bradley proposed using city redevelopment funds--if they are freed for such uses by the courts and state Legislature--to finance child care, tutoring and other activities to keep elementary school children off the streets in the afternoon.

That program could cost $200 million to $300 million over two decades, and would put the city in the unaccustomed role of Santa Claus for the schools. The city and the Los Angeles Unified School District have been separate entities for more than four decades, collecting their own taxes and setting their own budgets and rules.

Both initiatives are products of a reorganized and invigorated “brainstorming” staff of aides and deputies helping guide Bradley toward next April’s election, which could find the mayor pitted against an aggressive challenger, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

This staff of idea people, working under Deputy Mayor Mike Gage, meets weekly to toss around programs for Bradley to propose. This year, for instance, they have come up with plans to reduce traffic, moderate the effects of growth and fight street gangs. The aides research the topics and make recommendations, then Bradley decides which ideas he likes and dispenses them to the public at brief press conferences such as the one Tuesday.

Gage said Tuesday that the latest school proposals bear some historical connection to an ill-fated 1985 plan by Bradley to set up camp-like centers in the Los Angeles ghettos where local youths could move temporarily and be educated away from home.

Bradley said the centers would function like “military academies,” but the idea caused an outcry from some who thought the mayor was advocating removing children from their homes. The mayor said later that he meant for the centers to be voluntary programs, and Gage said Tuesday that Bradley stressed that the latest proposals would also be voluntary.

Under Tuesday’s plan, city employees would be able to take their half-day off to volunteer at any public, private or church school or at day-care centers licensed by the state. The offer to let 500 workers have two hours off a week is good only at public schools, Bradley said.

Officials for the Los Angeles Unified School District and the PTA said they were not aware of businesses that allot their employees a specific amount of time off to participate in their children’s schools. Some companies, such as Lockheed and Arco, allow employees a certain amount of time off to take care of personal business, including school matters. In the Los Angeles district, more than 400 companies participate in an “Adopt-a-School” program that sends employees into schools as volunteers.

But Betty Lindsey, president of the California State PTA, said Tuesday that allowing parents special time off from work to get involved in their local schools is an idea that “is being discussed in Sacramento and by business.” Lindsey said the statewide parent-teacher organization is supporting a bill by Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) that would require districts to bring parents of students with discipline problems to observe in their child’s classroom and would prevent businesses from penalizing employees who need time off to do so.