District Is Flunking, Say School Board Challengers

The seven candidates seeking to oust the San Fernando Valley’s two representatives on the Los Angeles Board of Education in the April 11 election share a longing for the schools they remember.

“I want to go back 20 years,” said candidate Michael Kaliczak at a recent candidates forum, “when the problems were whether or not to allow mustaches.”

Replacing those schools of memory--cheery places untainted by drugs, violence or large numbers of failing students--are institutions under siege, the challengers say. The schools are under attack by wasteful district bureaucrats, gang members, drug pushers and liberal promoters of busing, homosexuality and birth control, they say.

To those charges, the challengers add some alarming statistics on academic performance, such as the district’s high dropout rate and plummeting academic test scores that rank Los Angeles students lower than most nationwide.

Strike Threat

And after more than a year of negotiations, Los Angeles teachers are threatening to strike soon unless the school board agrees to their wage demands. In the classroom, the district’s 32,000 teachers are “afraid to turn their backs on students” because of increasing violence, said Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

“The system is not working,” said Barbara Romey, one of five challengers of West Valley incumbent Julie Korenstein. Romey and Gerald Horowitz, a junior high school principal, are considered to have the best chances of forcing Korenstein into a runoff.

Board President Roberta Weintraub, who represents the East Valley, is expected to outspend her two challengers since she has raised about $90,000 so far, nearly three times as much money as both of her opponents combined. Board members are paid $24,000 a year.

The recent classroom stabbing of a junior high school teacher in Sylmar and the shooting death of a longtime Grant High School teacher in front of his Sherman Oaks home have pushed violence ahead of other policy issues facing the Los Angeles board. A student has been charged with the stabbing at Olive Vista Junior High School, but no suspect has been found in the shooting of the Grant High teacher.

Violence Is Issue

“Violence is the No. 1 issue,” said Barry Pollack, an emergency room physician and former screenwriter who is challenging Weintraub for the East Valley seat. The third candidate in that race is Ernesto Llanes, an electrical contractor.

Concerns about campus violence already have prompted action by parents. One group of parents whose children attend Olive Vista school started collecting signatures shortly after the incident to have the school’s principal transferred. Parents said the principal hasn’t done enough to keep the campus safe.

In the climate of fear created by the attacks on teachers, it seems no measure is too severe. West Valley candidate Dauna Packer has called for tripling the number of campus police and issuing them guns, installing metal detectors at every school entrance and using police dogs to sniff out drugs.

“We know that some of these solutions cost money,” Packer said in a recent letter to Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Leonard M. Britton. “But many groups want to raise money to buy items such as metal detectors.”

At Korenstein’s request, the board two weeks ago approved forming a task force to study ways to reduce campus violence. Weintraub, who is seeking her fourth term on the school board, has called for metal detectors on some campuses and surprise locker searches.

Legislation Introduced

State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) on Friday introduced legislation that would increase the penalties for attacks on teachers, require that districts such as Los Angeles’ spend more money on security and make it easier to prosecute minors as adults if they assault teachers. The cost of increased security to the Los Angeles district under the proposal would be an estimated $8 million to $10 million.

“Schools are very different from when I was a student,” said Robbins, a 1960 graduate of North Hollywood High School. “Back then, no one would even contemplate an attack on a teacher.”

Weintraub said her support of Robbins’ bill and her call for increased security is not in response to the election. “I have been out there in the community talking about violence for 10 years,” she said.

Pollack, Weintraub’s most active opponent, said he disagrees with her approach. He said he favors creating special schools for violent students.

“We don’t need more guards armed with guns,” said Pollack, who lives in Sherman Oaks and has a daughter in a Los Angeles school. “But we need to get kids with guns out of schools . . . put them in special schools with teachers especially trained to handle them.”

Both approaches cost money. The board is looking at how to cut $70 million to $80 million from its $3.5-billion annual budget to pay for a three-year, 20% raise offered to teachers. The teachers union has asked for a 21% raise over two years.

To reverse a decline in academic achievement among Los Angeles students, the board last week approved a 10-year, $431-million plan.

Weintraub said that if necessary, money must be taken from funds for classroom materials to pay for increased security. “We have to re-prioritize,” she said.

Pollack said he would cut spending on administration of the district, which ranks as the second largest in the country with 592,000 students.

Weintraub, who holds an overwhelming advantage because of her widespread name recognition and popularity in the East Valley, has raised nearly twice as much money as Pollack.

Although they are both incumbents, neither Korenstein nor Weintraub has endorsed one another. Most of Korenstein’s district is west of the San Diego Freeway.

Korenstein is described by her challengers as too liberal because she has supported a program to counsel gay and lesbian students, as has a board majority, and the creation of three school-based health clinics that dispense birth-control information and devices. She has been criticized for her support of the district’s bilingual education plan, which her challengers oppose.

Korenstein, who has been supportive of UTLA and has been endorsed by the teachers union, said her positions reflect her constituency. She is expected to raise and spend about $100,000 in the election, five times more than what her nearest challenger is expected to raise.

Her most active opponents, Romey and Horowitz, are competing for conservative voters. Romey, a conservative Republican, said she will try to reopen closed schools, reduce student busing and make sure that year-round schools never come to the Valley. Horowitz, a conservative Democrat, said the seven-member board needs a tough, seasoned school administrator.

Romey, an accountant who was defeated by Korenstein in the 1987 runoff, has received support from members of the Orange County-based California Coalition for Traditional Values, a fundamentalist Christian group that opposes the district’s gay counseling program. Korenstein has called members of that group “right-wing fanatics” and has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service about the tax-exempt group’s involvement in the election.

Packer, who shares a business with her husband, has called for the West Valley to separate from the rest of the district, an idea that has been defeated in the past. The area is one of the last sections of the 700-square-mile Los Angeles Unified School District in which large pockets of predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class white neighborhoods remain.

Packer said the district is too large to be run efficiently.

Also running against Korenstein is Cliff Stadig, a retired building contractor, who has said he favors the teaching of ethics to combat what he called “values-neutral” education.

Kaliczak, owner of a printing business, said he is running against Korenstein because he is “one of those parents who has lost faith in the system. We need more normal people like me to run things.”