Challengers Sweep Field in Centinela School Race

Incumbents generally fared well in South Bay school board elections Tuesday, but challengers swept the field in the Centinela Valley Union High School District, a dramatic upset that could cause problems for Supt. McKinley Nash.

The ousted incumbents--Ann Birdsall, Aleta Collins and Herbert Bartelt--were Nash’s strongest supporters on the district’s five-member board. Two of the victors--Lawndale Planning Commission Chairwoman Pam Sturgeon and Lennox accountant Jacqueline Carrera--have been critical of the superintendent. The third challenger elected, Amparo Font, a bilingual teacher from Hawthorne, has declined to offer an opinion on Nash.

There already is talk that Tuesday’s results augur drastic personnel changes in the school district, which has been beset by friction between the administration of Nash, who is black, and the union that represents the district’s overwhelmingly white teaching corps. The union, the Centinela Valley Secondary Teachers Assn., endorsed Carrera and Sturgeon.

“Dr. Nash will be gone and the administrators will be changed,” Birdsall predicted Tuesday night. “That really hurts me because those (people) in the administration have given their all.”

Celebrating her victory at her campaign manager’s house in Lawndale Tuesday night, Sturgeon stopped short of calling for Nash’s ouster, saying only that she would like to tighten board control over the superintendent.

Nash on Wednesday appeared to be waiting to see what the attitude of the district’s new board members will be. “I intend to remain in this job if I can be productive for the students of this district,” the superintendent said. “If I can’t be productive I have no interest in it.”

In all, Tuesday’s elections settled a total of seven South Bay school board races, including contests in Torrance, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo, Hermosa Beach and Hawthorne.

In the Torrance Unified School District, board incumbent Carol O’Brien lost to challenger John Eubanks, who came in second in a five-way race for three seats. The other winners were board President William Blischke, who ran third, and incumbent Ann Gallagher, who led the field.

The Torrance Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 870 teachers, and the California School Employees Assn., composed of the district’s 160 clerical workers, endorsed just two candidates in the race--Eubanks and Blischke.

O’Brien expressed frustration at not drawing a union endorsement, saying the unions got “the best deal they’ve ever had in the last four years, and why they turned on this particular Board of Education, I don’t understand.”

In the Manhattan Beach City Elementary School District, voters returned two incumbents, RosaLee Saikley and Gary R. Collins, by comfortable margins.

Torrance attorney Bernard O’Connor Jr. captured the third seat by outpolling Ronald G. Durham, another challenger.

O’Connor attributed his election to hard work: “I went to PTA meetings. I put up signs and sent out mailings. I made an effort to meet as many people as I could.”

Collins said he and Saikley fared well because many Manhattan Beach residents feel their elementary school district is improving after years of declining enrollments and budget shortfalls.

In the El Segundo Unified School District, Tuesday’s elections brought four new faces to the five-member board.

Jim Butterworth, Nancy Wernick and Ken Schofield won four-year terms, and Keith R. Wise was elected to serve the two years remaining on the term of Andrew Wallet, who resigned last year.

Among the casualties in the contest was Ruth Parks, the only incumbent in the race, and board appointee Timothy Chang, an attorney whom the state Supreme Court disbarred in July after finding that he misappropriated more than $7,000 from a client, the Mellon Bank of Philadelphia.

Butterworth attributed the defeats of Parks and Chang to public sentiment that the school board has been unresponsive to parents. He said his first order of business will be to begin negotiations with the teachers, whose contracts expire next year.

“It’s important to begin face-to-face,” Butterworth said. “Teachers feel they are underpaid, and we’ll do the best we can for them.” Schofield said he would like to see teachers get a 10% across-the-board pay increase.

In the Hermosa Beach City School District, board incumbents Mary Lou Weiss and Lynne Gonzales were reelected to second terms, while challenger Gregory J. Kelsey, a commercial mortgage banker, captured the third seat up for grabs on the five-member board. Odd man out in the four-way race was challenger Bill Druar.

Candidates agreed that a shortage of classroom space is the most pressing problem facing the crowded district, which has had to set up portable classrooms at its only school, the Hermosa Valley School. Other issues facing the board are the sale of excess school property, including the site of the now-defunct South School, and whether to merge with other beach city school districts.

In the Hawthorne School District there were no surprises as voters returned all three incumbents to the three seats at stake.

Reelected by strong margins were John D. Andersen, a sales representative for a bottled water company, Rosemarie Caldwell, an account clerk with the Centinela Valley Union High School District, and Leslie V. Smullen, a supervisor for the U.S. Postal Service in Hawthorne.

Also contributing to this article were Times staff writers Adrianne Goodman, Marc Lacey, Hugo Martin, Janet Rae-Dupree and Yolanda Rodriguez.