Teachers, Parents Seek Role in Making Decisions at Marshall

In the nearly 60-year history of John Marshall High School, its community has rallied to save its elaborate buildings from demolition and its teachers have worked for curriculum improvements.

But not until now, say Marshall’s teachers, parents and community members, have they had an opportunity to share in major decision-making about how the school is run.

Tonight, parents of Marshall students may be told that a committee of teachers and parents will ask the Los Angeles Unified School District for permission to overhaul Marshall’s decision-making structure.

“Instead of saying, ‘Come and be involved in PTA,’ we’re going to say to parents, ‘Come and be involved in the finance committee. Come and be involved in staff development,’ ” said John Brown, parent of two Marshall students and a member of the school’s shared-decision-making council, a group of teachers, parents, community leaders and administrators.

The proposed restructuring is the second part of a process created after May’s teachers’ strike, which produced contracts that gave more decision-making power in schools to teachers, parents and the community.

In the first stage, Marshall formed a shared-decision-making council that shares responsibility with the school’s principal in five areas: continuing education programs for teachers, student discipline, scheduling of final exams and other events, spending of certain funds, such as lottery income, and use of school equipment, such as the photocopy machine. The decisions are made by consensus, with a vote taken only as a last resort.

The second stage of the process--school-based management--will broaden the areas in which the council, teachers, parents and the community may share decisions with top administrators.

The request the council is likely to make tonight is for permission to apply for school-based management. Schools that make the request will learn by April 27 if they will be allowed to submit specific proposals. A district Central Council will review the proposals and by August will name 70 schools where the restructuring will be carried out.

Marshall’s 140 teachers were scheduled to vote late Wednesday on whether to approve submission of the request to the district. Teacher representatives indicated that the request was likely to garner the two-thirds approval needed. Parents will be informed tonight about the outcome of the vote.

At Marshall, restructuring of districtwide guidelines into specific, local policies is essential, teachers and parents said. The school is diverse: About half of the students are Latino, with the other half a mixture of Anglos, Armenians, Asians, Koreans and others. About 85% of the students live in homes where English is not the primary language. Some students come from low-income, immigrant families from Silver Lake; others come from affluent neighborhoods in Los Feliz.

Restructuring through school-based management could address the needs of a diverse student body and bring gradual but fundamental changes in the way that the school is run, Brown said.

Marshall’s request to apply for school-based management states that it will use its restructuring to address academic achievement, attendance, dropouts and acute student crises.

But the specific proposal, due by June 15, could request permission to overhaul the way that the school is run. Shared-decision-making councils could take over responsibility for such issues as teacher hiring and curriculum. Even decisions dictated by contracts or district policy could be changed if a school’s request to do so is approved by the Central Council, said Shel Erlich, a district spokesman.

“It could mean anything,” said Deborah Leidner, Marshall’s principal. “It’s almost a blank check.”

Although it is too early to prove that restructuring works, teachers and administrators at Marshall said they are hopeful that power-sharing can curtail the school’s most widespread problems:

* Attendance--on an average day, about 300 to 400 of the school’s 2,900 students are absent, according to counselor Barbara Knight.

* Dropouts--the rate has been as high as 46%, according to Brown.

* Academic achievement--the school is widely known for winning the national academic decathlon in 1987, and this year won local fame when a mock trial team took second place in a national competition. But those associated with the school said restructuring may allow them to better address the needs of students who speak little or no English, have after-school jobs or are liable to fail or drop out.

It could also affect relationships between those who run the school.

“Teachers want school-based management to give them an equal voice” with administrators and the principal, said Knight, the teachers union representative at the school. “In the end, it should make their lives much easier because they won’t have to bear the load alone.”

Leidner became principal of Marshall in August after Don Hahn retired and after negotiations with the district produced the new shared-power structure. Knight said she believes that Leidner, like other principals, may be reluctant to give up power. But Leidner said she welcomes the change.

“The potential here for making this school a better place is awesome, but it’s a shared responsibility,” she said. “We want everyone to feel a part of it. It’s not going to work if people don’t feel it’s theirs.”

That is an issue at Marshall and throughout the district. Parents have complained that teachers have a greater voice on the council and thus are able to advance their specific interests, Erlich said.

Under United Teachers-Los Angeles’ contract with the district, half of the shared-decision-making council’s members must be teachers. Knight said many parents participate in council subcommittees, but only four serve on Marshall’s 16-member council.

“I don’t feel we’re adequately represented,” said Brown, executive director of the Los Angeles Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse. “If we are selected as one of the 70 sites for restructuring, we have the option of reconstructing the council itself. I would like to see more parental involvement.”

That is not the only change that could be made to the council. Its present membership--mostly Anglos--does not reflect the ethnic diversity of the school, teachers said.

Marshall’s council, elected last summer, has made positive if only minor changes in school operations, its members said. It has scheduled a staff development seminar in May on gangs, changed final exam schedules and examined student discipline guidelines.

But members acknowledge that their responsibility has been limited and that the council structure has not given them as much power as they anticipated. They thought that they could approve or disapprove certain school activities; instead, they have power only to change scheduling of such events, they said.

A proposal by some teachers to eliminate homeroom--a brief period early in the school day when teachers record students’ attendance--is in arbitration between UTLA and the district because teachers were told that they could not make the decision, Knight said.

Council members said they have also been restrained by their lack of experience with the issues and the need to reach consensus. But, they said, they have not yet been forced to a vote.

“It’s amazing when you have 16 people at the table. Sometimes a choice of a given word can be very significant,” said Paul Michael Newman, a council member who lives in the community but is not a parent. “It doesn’t mean we ultimately come up with the Magna Carta. But for those of us who think schools have been stifled by a top-heavy bureaucracy, this gives us a chance at the local school site to be more dynamic.”

Those familiar with Marshall said teachers and the community have historically been vocal about their roles at the school. When officials in the mid-1970s threatened to tear down the school’s elaborate buildings because they did not meet earthquake standards, those groups waged a 10-year battle and the buildings were renovated, Leidner said.

Marshall’s teachers had an instrumental role in last year’s negotiations, those close to the school said, from circulating petitions on issues to demanding better access to the school’s photocopy machine. Much of the effort was initiated by Helen Bernstein, a Marshall counselor who, as a UTLA officer, led last year’s districtwide effort to demand more power for teachers and parents.

But until the shared-decision-making council was established, teachers and parents had no real power, she and others said. Committees that discussed curriculum or certain funds could merely make suggestions to top administrators or make partial decisions that could be vetoed by the principal.

That may change if Marshall is chosen to implement school-based management.

“This could mean a whole new ballgame,” Brown said. “If we can be more creative in managing what we’ve got, we should be able to produce better educated students and more graduates.”