Entrenched O.C. Schools Chief Called Out of Touch

Orange County Education Supt. Robert D. Peterson labors in a strange kind of obscurity. He is one of the highest-paid public educators in the state-- only two elected officials in the county make more--and he sits at the helm of a sprawling $66-million-a-year educational bureaucracy.

And yet, after 23 years and six countywide elections, Peterson still maintains a low political profile. Most teachers rarely have direct contact with him or his department, which is responsible for educating handicapped children and juvenile offenders as well as lending business, legal and other support to school districts. Most students get their education without ever needing the services of the county office, and most parents sense little need to pay attention to it.

By all appearances, voters seem happy with Peterson’s performance: They have reelected him five times during the past quarter century, usually by huge margins.

But district superintendents, who are on the receiving end of the county department’s services, are not nearly as pleased. An overwhelming majority of them say Peterson is out of touch with contemporary educational issues, and they advocate changing his job from an elected to an appointed post.

Moreover, while the superintendents praise some aspects of the county department and credit it with modest improvement in recent years, many believe the operation needs to be dramatically reshaped to prepare the county for sweeping demographic changes expected in the 1990s.

“If the County Department of Education ceased to exist tomorrow, it would be six or eight months before we even noticed it was missing,” one district superintendent, demanding anonymity, said.

Those remarks and similar criticisms were echoed by most of the county’s primary and secondary superintendents, 23 of whom were interviewed. There are 27 primary and secondary districts contained wholly within Orange County.

“There’s this rather general feeling among many superintendents that the county is not well served by the Education Department or the superintendent,” said Capistrano Unified School District Supt. Jerome R. Thornsley. “I don’t share in that feeling, but it’s certainly out there.”

Others, some speaking on the condition that they not be identified, were more scathing: “I don’t find him very inspiring or energetic,” one superintendent said. “I don’t know what he does.”

Dissent from district superintendents is hardly new for the soft-spoken and gentlemanly Southerner who recently announced his plans to run for a seventh term. First elected in 1966, Peterson--a conservative who once attended John Birch Society meetings but says he was never a member--has amassed a long and controversial tenure, marked by his growing political invincibility, by a running battle with a succession of grand juries and by the international spread of his pet project: a student competition known as the Academic Decathlon.

During that time, Peterson has also risen to become one of the state’s best-paid public educators. At $98,663 a year, his salary far surpasses State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, a $74,500-a-year employee.

He narrowly out-earns the superintendents of San Diego and Los Angeles counties. In Los Angeles, widely regarded as the state’s finest county education office, the superintendent oversees a $234-million operation with 1.3 million students--about four times the size of Orange County’s operation. The superintendent there makes $95,768, about $3,000 a year less than Peterson.

“I can’t tell you that it’s because he does more and works harder than any other superintendent because I don’t believe that,” said Sheila Meyers, a member of the education department’s Board of Trustees. Meyers added that board members set the salary several years ago and deliberately made Peterson’s high as a way of enhancing the county’s prestige in the education community.

Peterson says his salary is comparable to most big-county superintendents and calls differences “inconsequential.”

“I’m not staying on the job for the money,” Peterson said.

If Peterson’s tenure has been marked by disagreements with the district superintendents, however, they have been nothing compared to the grand jury clashes, a series of confrontations that are the stuff of legend among Orange County educators. Less than three years after he took office, a grand jury sharply criticized Peterson’s operation of his department. It became the first in a long line of grand juries to recommend making the superintendent’s post an appointed office rather than an elected one.

Subsequent grand juries accused the superintendent of mismanagement, of deficit spending and of duplicating services provided by individual school districts. One report criticized the county videotape production unit, which it said was under-used, and another went so far as to suggest abolishing the county office altogether.

Only a few of the district superintendents believe abolishing the department is the answer, but all but two of them interviewed for this article agreed that Peterson’s job should become an appointed one. Voters, however, have overwhelmingly rejected that idea twice, once in 1978 and once in 1988.

Garden Grove Unified School District Supt. Ed Dundon said an elected school board choosing its superintendent makes more sense professionally. Under that system, the board could fire the superintendent, a power it does not have as long as the superintendent is elected.

“Voters traditionally have rejected that, thinking, probably that it reduces their authority,” Dundon conceded. Other superintendents agreed, calling it a moot point.

Peterson adamantly opposes the change, as he has for decades.

While Peterson resists attempts to tamper with his office, however, district superintendents complain that they are not receiving the help they need to guide county schools and schoolchildren into the 1990s.

In particular, superintendents said they needed more assistance in grappling with limited-English instruction, population projections, transportation issues and health concerns such as AIDS. In addition to running special education and juvenile court schools, the county department coordinates business operations and provides other services to school districts.

“I feel we’re back in the ‘30s and ‘40s in terms of our problems and the way we’re dealing with them,” said Cynthia F. Grennan, superintendent of Anaheim Union High School District. “Sometimes I’ve had to read data on population changes in the newspaper rather than get it from the county. I would be much more comfortable if the county was doing more research.”

Duncan Johnson, superintendent of the Fullerton School District, echoed Grennan’s criticism. “There needs to be much, much more in the way of services, and to the extent that we haven’t gotten it, that may reflect a lack of leadership,” he said.

A few superintendents praised Peterson, however, and virtually all said they believed the county office was run without a trace of corruption or malfeasance.

J. Kenneth Jones, superintendent of the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, credited Peterson with making or allowing significant improvements in the department’s business operations during the past few years, and several other superintendents agreed.

“If someone says that we’re not leaders, they don’t know the totality of our program,” Peterson said in response to the criticisms. “The superintendents don’t know the whole story. They really don’t have the front-line opinions. They hear things, but that doesn’t say everything.”

But even Peterson acknowledged that there are areas in which the county has not played a leading role. In curriculum development, for instance, he said San Diego and other counties may be out in front with innovative programs. And in English as a second language, a topic of immediate concern to Orange County schools, Peterson conceded that districts within the county--Santa Ana Unified, for instance--have already forged programs beyond what the county office can suggest.

“You can’t be a leader in all directions,” Peterson said. “I deliberately chose a couple of areas and concentrated on them.”

Superintendents and others credit him for a few initiatives, but many say he has become increasingly removed from the fast-changing educational landscape. Some county school board members and former department employees portray Peterson as a quirky, cautious leader, reluctant to take action and stubbornly clinging to increasingly archaic notions about education.

Former employees also say he runs a rigid, top-heavy administration, where officials treat any outside inquiry as potentially threatening. Education Department officers who are contacted by members of the media or local dignitaries are expected to contact Peterson and file a written memo, known at the district offices as a “flash,” specifying the nature of the request.

“I perceive that the times are moving too fast for him, that problems are too much for him,” said Marjorie Rushforth, a lawyer who represented a teacher’s successful suit against the district for preventing him from teaching because he has AIDS. “He seems frozen when confronted by complex issues.”

Peterson incurred the wrath of civil libertarians and others several years ago when he barred that teacher, Vincent Chalk, from the classroom. But even now, after a court forced him to back down, Peterson does not acknowledge having erred.

“I would say that those people who were continuing to teach with AIDS when it was not completely known how contagious it was were very thoughtless,” he said. “We’re still learning about the virus.”

As Peterson launches his seventh campaign for the county’s top education post, he says he views the next four years as a chance to implement new programs along the lines of those that have distinguished his superintendency.

One of those is the Academic Decathlon, a high school competition that lumps students into teams and tests their academic skills. It is Peterson’s proudest creation, and even his detractors give him credit for inventing and popularizing it. Still, it takes much staff time and benefits relatively few students, critics say.

“It’s not motivational just for the students,” Peterson responded. “It turns teachers who might be logy more enthusiastic too.”

For the coming decade, Peterson suggests more of the same, touting new contests in reading as a way of stimulating younger children. Superintendents, who are bracing for an onslaught of social ills, take little comfort in a new reading competition as the answer to their troubles.

“Dr. Peterson really deserves credit for the Academic Decathlon,” one superintendent said. “It’s spread all over the state and country. But that was 20 years ago, and we’re looking for some new ideas to get us into the future. We’re just not getting them.”

COMPARATIVE SALARIES

ORANGE COUNTY ELECTED OFFICIALS

Office Salary County district attorney $110,781 County sheriff-coroner $101,525 County superintendent of schools $98,663 County auditor-controller $90,064 County treasurer-tax collector $89,856 County assessor $87,547 County supervisor $75,296

MAJOR CALIFORNIA EDUCATION PLAYERS

Budget Number of School Superintendent Salary (Millions) Students Orange County $98,663 $66 350,909 Los Angeles County $95,768 $234 1.3 million San Diego County $94,500 $67.4 448,748 California superintendent $74,500 -- -- of public instruction, Bill Honig

Number of School Superintendent Districts Orange County 27 Los Angeles County 82 San Diego County 43 California superintendent -- of public instruction, Bill Honig