Change in the Offing : Community College Trustees: Larsen, Senour, Ducheny

With three entrenched incumbents retiring after long careers, this fall’s San Diego Community College District election affords voters the best opportunity ever to reshape the 17-year-old school system’s leadership.

Retiring trustees Dan Grady (District A) and Charles Reid (District E) have held their posts since the community colleges split off from the city schools in 1973. District C trustee Louise Dyer also is leaving after nine years.

Also gone is much of the acrimony between the faculty and the 12-year administration of former Chancellor Garland Peed, who left two years ago.

The district’s 120,000 local students and 7,000 employees, as well as San Diegans unaffiliated with the district, would do well to pay attention to these otherwise low-profile contests. The trustees they select Nov. 6 will implement the sweeping reforms of Assembly Bill 1725, the 2-year-old legislation that redefined the state’s community college system, and oversee a $230 - million budget.

The District C race matches Yvonne Larsen, and her distinguished resume of educational accomplishment, against neophyte Kara Kobey. We recommend that voters choose Larsen.

Larsen has been vice chairwoman of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which wrote the path-breaking study “A Nation at Risk.” She was president of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education and a California State University trustee.

She proposes to expand literacy programs and efforts to recapture school dropouts. She supports shared governance, seeks to improve public awareness of the district’s offerings and wants better communication between faculty and administrators.

Larsen is from the city’s old guard of conservatives, a circumstance that may lead to some friction on a more progressive board and with the faculty. Nevertheless, she is clearly the more qualified candidate for the post.

The races in Districts A and E pose more difficult choices. In District A, two articulate candidates with solid educational credentials are seeking Grady’s seat. Though it is a close call, we believe that San Diego State University professor Maria Senour is a better choice than Miramar College teacher Bob Bacon.

A professor of counselor education for SDSU, Senour works at the community college district’s Educational Cultural Complex and serves on its advisory committee. Senour has won the endorsement of the faculty political-action committee and the teachers’ union, despite the fact that Bacon teaches at Miramar, one of the district’s three colleges. Bacon is not a union member.

Senour, who could join District E candidate Denise Moreno Ducheny as the first Latinas to serve on the board, proposes more academic and personal counseling for students to keep them from quitting the community colleges and wants to upgrade Mesa College’s facilities.

She shows an instinctive understanding of the community colleges’ role as a bridge to a better life for economically disadvantaged people.

The District E race for Reid’s seat pits activist attorney Ducheny against former SDSU professor Hope Logan, a city civil service commissioner and former board member of the San Diego Urban League.

Either woman would make an exemplary trustee. Both are thoughtful, articulate and passionate about the community colleges’ crucial role in educating minorities.

But we like Ducheny’s style. Although some consider her confrontational, Ducheny shows the kind of fire needed on this board. Her legal skills would be a plus.

Ducheny enthusiastically endorses shared governance between administration and faculty, wants the community colleges to produce bilingual teachers and wants to upgrade the libraries at City and Mesa colleges--goals that she appears well-suited to accomplish with her combination of intelligence and energy.