Wilson to Name Honig Ally as Schools Adviser

In his first major departure from the policies of his predecessor, Gov.-elect Pete Wilson plans to name as his education adviser a Democratic woman with close ties to state schools Supt. Bill Honig, sources said Thursday.

Maureen DiMarco, who has been critical of the Deukmejian Administration as a member of the Garden Grove school board and as past president of the California School Boards Assn., will be appointed today as secretary for Child Development and Education, a newly created cabinet-level post, the sources said.

DiMarco, reached at a Sacramento hotel, confirmed that she has spoken to Wilson about a position in his Administration but would not say whether she would get the appointment. However, sources close to DiMarco and the incoming Administration said she was the senator’s choice for the job.

The selection of DiMarco, 42, is Wilson’s first significant move out of the shadow of his fellow Republican, Gov. George Deukmejian. The other cabinet officials Wilson has named--Finance Director Thomas W. Hayes and Agriculture Director Henry Voss--had both been Deukmejian appointees.

By elevating education to a cabinet position and combining it with children’s services, Wilson has given these issues more prominence than Deukmejian ever did. Deukmejian, in fact, waited six months into his first term before naming a person to advise him on education matters.

Finally, in choosing someone linked to Honig--who has been Deukmejian’s harshest critic on education issues--Wilson may set the stage for a thawing of the cold relationship between the governor’s office and the superintendent. This comes as a budget crisis is likely to force public schools to share in the state’s fiscal squeeze.

The expected appointment won praise Thursday from all segments of the education community.

“The signal this sends is that this Administration wants to be open and honest and try to work these things out rather than simply making pronouncements and going with them,” said Ed Foglia, president of the 230,000-member California Teachers Assn., a group that has long been at odds with Deukmejian. “This would be a great move on Wilson’s part.”

DiMarco, of Cypress, is an education policy consultant and a board member of the Garden Grove Unified School District, the state’s 11th largest with 37,000 students.

She helped run fellow Democrat Honig’s campaign for superintendent of public instruction in 1982 and worked for him for about a year at the start of his first term. She was united with Honig and the California Teachers Assn. last summer in a bitter battle to stop Deukmejian from suspending Proposition 98, the voter-approved measure that guarantees schools about 40% of state funds each year.

Since then, DiMarco has said she could support Wilson’s proposal to revise or rescind Proposition 98 as long as she was confident that school funding could be protected in some other way.

In a recent interview, DiMarco said schools made progress during Deukmejian’s first term but began to backslide in 1987 when the governor insisted on a tax rebate at a time when Democrats were fighting to give much of a $1.1-billion budget surplus to the schools.

“When the state started sending out those $35 (rebate) checks, that’s when things began to go sour,” she said.

DiMarco said she sensed that education never was a very high priority for the law enforcement-oriented Republican chief executive.

“Deukmejian came to do prisons, and schools were in his face for eight years,” she said.

The relationship between DiMarco and Wilson dates to Wilson’s campaign address in December, 1989, to the school boards association, which she then headed. In the speech, Wilson departed from traditional Republican dogma and endorsed the concept of integrating social welfare services--including medical and mental health care--with the public school system.

Wilson advocated this approach as a way to alleviate the home-life stress that he believes is at the root of many student problems.

DiMarco praised the speech that day and went on to become an adviser to the Wilson campaign. She has said it is essential to bring health and social services into the schools if educators are to have the chance to teach children free from the distractions caused by poverty and drugs.

“What I see happening to children before they reach the schoolhouse door is scaring the daylights out of me,” DiMarco said recently. “We can’t fix drug abuse and teen pregnancies by putting out a better textbook.”

Honig said in an interview that the selection of DiMarco would be a “very positive” step.

“It says something about the kind of people Pete Wilson has on his staff,” Honig said. “They are very positive and pragmatic. They want to work together to get things done. Maureen is in that mold.”

A former teacher’s aide and volunteer part-time school secretary, DiMarco was elected to the Garden Grove School Board nine years ago.

Married to Richard DiMarco, an aeronautical engineer, and the mother of two daughters, DiMarco put her law school education on hold this year to fight a losing battle for more state education funds.

Local school officials say DiMarco will bring an interesting perspective to the governor’s office because of the Garden Grove district’s ethnic diversity; two-thirds of its students are minorities. The district is also one of the lowest in Orange County in terms of state dollars allocated per pupil.

Dianne Jacob, a San Diego County school board member and, like DiMarco, former president of the school boards association, said DiMarco was “the best person in the state Wilson could have selected for this position at this time.”

“What I see Gov. Wilson doing is bringing a breath of fresh air into his Administration to create the necessary changes that must be made for us to move ahead,” Jacob said. “If anybody can help resolve the problems education faces and children face in this state, she is the one who can put it together.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers William Trombley in Sacramento and Gebe Martinez in Orange County.