Local Elections : Senior Citizens May Have Big Say in School Elections

Ask the folks at the Fairfax Senior Citizens’ Center for their views on Los Angeles public education and you will get an earful.

“The big thing . . . is when the kids come out (of school), are they going to grab your purse?” Rose Lee, 78, said recently as she lunched at the busy Melrose Avenue center.

At the next table, Dave Edson, 76, complained about students who bump and shove senior citizens on RTD buses. “They should learn to respect their elders,” he said.

And 90-year-old Sam Jacobs blamed his neighborhood’s crime problems on the failures of education. “You’re not safe to go out on the streets,” Jacobs said.

These are not voices heard at PTA meetings, back-to-school nights or downtown school board debates.

But they are among the voices that are likely to resonate the loudest in Tuesday’s potentially pivotal Los Angeles school board election.

Senior citizens like Lee, Edson and Jacobs have a big say in low-interest school board contests because, voting patterns show, they dutifully go to the polls in elections big and small.

As with other small-but-motivated groups of voters, including teachers, the elderly have become more important as voter participation in school board races has diminished. The once-broad base of school election voters--those who repeatedly approved local school construction bonds in the 1950s and ‘60s--have gradually eroded.

In the last Los Angeles school board election two years ago, fewer than one in seven eligible voters cast ballots. A few years earlier when there was no Los Angeles mayor’s race or major City Council contest on the ballot to attract attention, only 8% of eligible voters went to the polls in a school board election. Fifteen to 20 years ago, 35% to 45% of the voters turned out for school board races.

Several political consultants said that with a lopsided mayor’s race at the top of the ticket, Tuesday’s turnout will be low, perhaps 25%. Participation in the school board election will probably be even lower. Four years ago, when 35% of the city’s voters cast ballots for mayor, only 25% voted in some school board races.

While the election is important to hundreds of thousands of students and their parents, it will largely be the senior citizens, most of whom have no children in school, who will tip the scales.

Arnold Steinberg, a San Fernando Valley-based veteran political consultant who has directed campaigns of several school board members, estimated that up to half of those who vote on Tuesday will be over 55.

“Any candidate worth his salt” is going to be campaigning at retirement homes, said Steinberg, who is not working on this school board election.

Older residents do not pay close attention to school issues, he said, but they do vote and “they care about wasteful spending and they care about crime and violence.”

The battle for the senior citizen vote is most evident in the Westside district where two-term incumbent Alan Gershman is facing an aggressive challenge from Mark Slavkin, a county supervisor’s aide who has the backing of the teachers’ union, United Teachers-Los Angeles. Three seats will be decided citywide, but a win by Slavkin could tilt the balance of the school board the union’s way at a time when the teachers are locked in a major contract battle for higher pay and other concessions.

The Fairfax District is crucial because it has one of the city’s largest concentrations of elderly. And Westside City Councilman Zev Yaroslavksy, who is popular in the heavily Jewish area, is facing a challenge that could boost the turnout there.

As a result, a sizable share of the precinct walkers and campaign mail for school board candidates in the Westside district will be targeted at Fairfax in the closing days of the race.

“You need the senior vote,” said Jerry Seedborg, a former aide to state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who is directing Gershman’s direct mail campaign.

Rick Taylor, Slavkin’s direct mail strategist, agreed. Fairfax is important, and he will be hitting hard on the crime issue--a big concern to seniors--because that “seems to be everyone’s major concern” and where Slavkin can get “the biggest bang for the buck.”

Campus Crime an Issue

Slavkin has made campus crime his leading issue. He often starts off public appearances by recounting school shootings and citing increases in arrests on Westside campuses. He calls for more police to be deployed at schools.

On a recent precinct walk in Fairfax, Slavkin tried to deliver the message personally, knocking on the apartment doors of voters that a computer analysis told him were most likely to go to polls next week.

It was a small but telling portrait of the campaign and the concerns of these important voters. At several stops, Slavkin was met only by voices--frightened, old voices--coming from behind sturdy, bolted doors. The seniors were not about to open up for a young stranger.

The determined candidate responded by hollering through the barrier his pledges to do something about “the gangs and bureaucracy that are really affecting our kids.” Before leaving, he would gently extract a promise that the faceless voice would look over the literature he left behind.

Gershman charged Slavkin is “playing on people’s fears” by emphasizing the crime issue. “That’s deplorable,” Gershman said. “It is not factual to suggest we are rampant with crimes and gangs on the Westside. It’s just not the case.”

But Gershman’s campaign team appears to recognize the power of the issue. They acknowledged that crime is a major concern and said they will emphasize Gershman’s votes to upgrade the school police force and his endorsement from Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block.

Waste Alleged

On another theme likely to have special appeal to senior citizens, Slavkin’s mail is attacking Gershman for supporting allegedly wasteful spending and being “in the pocket” of high-paid school district administrators, many of whom are contributing to Gershman’s campaign.

Although Gershman has not yet responded at the mailbox, his strategy on the wasteful spending front is to portray Slavkin as an ambitious opportunist who wants to expand the school system’s “political bureaucracy.” He cites a Slavkin proposal to make the current $24,000-per-year, part-time board positions full time.

Older residents may be the most important group of voters, but teachers are becoming more significant as voter turnout declines. There are an estimated 7,000 district teachers living on the Westside, and Slavkin is counting on getting most of their votes. The union, which represents 32,000 teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians and psychologists, has been attacking Gershman and promoting Slavkin and Julie Korenstein--who is facing a strong challenge in her bid to hang onto her West San Fernando Valley seat--through newsletters to its members. In addition, Slavkin has been going school-to-school appealing to teachers with promises to increase their pay and give them more say in how schools are run.

Depending on how low the turnout is, teachers could account for up to 10% of the votes, enough to sway an otherwise close contest.

Low turnouts are a problem in many local elections, but they particularly trouble education officials. They worry that increasingly those making decisions about who will run the schools have no children attending them or have special interests.

“People have abdicated their responsibility to a handful of folks who are making the decisions for everyone,” said William Ingram, president of the California School Boards Assn.

The gap between those using the public schools and those deciding who runs the public schools appears to be widening in urban school districts like Los Angeles. The pool of eligible voters is aging; many new minority students coming into the district have non-citizen parents; more middle-class families are fleeing to private schools, and many parents who choose to remain with public schools are both working and have less time to become involved and vote.

While the campaign is keying on crime, allegations of waste and labor contracts, these are not what most troubles Warren Steinberg.

Principal’s Problems

As principal of Fairfax High School, which is a a block down Melrose from the Fairfax Senior Citizens Center, Steinberg said his biggest problems are getting “kids to perform to their capacity,” getting enough personnel to counsel them and keep them from skipping school and to get more parents actively involved in what goes on at the campus.

“You are not getting a lot of response from any level regarding educational matters,” he said.

The folks at the Fairfax seniors center are the first to admit they pay little attention to school affairs until students bother them.

“Seniors are interested in what affects them,” Rose Lee said.

Nonetheless, Lee and half a dozen others all said they will vote in the school board election. They said they will review the campaign mail and, as one 89-year-old woman put it, try to figure out who is telling the truth.

But as of several days ago, not one knew a thing about the school board candidates.