CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS 12TH DISTRICT : Bernson vs. Korenstein : Her strength is said to lie in dealing with administrative issues and being a strong advocate for teachers.

As a new member of the Los Angeles school board, Julie Korenstein needed only a few months to do what the board president had repeatedly tried to accomplish.

The action was giving away surplus school lunches to the needy instead of throwing them away.

“I’d spent three or four years trying to get leftover food to people who were hungry, and I finally gave up,” board President Jackie Goldberg said. She added that she was surprised that Korenstein, a rookie, had persuaded administrators to give the idea a try.

It was the 1987 fall semester. Korenstein had been on the board only about six months.

“It was just common sense,” Korenstein said of the food giveaway, which she lists as one of her major accomplishments as a board member. “Food was being thrown away, and people were going hungry.” The program now supplies meals from more than 200 schools to 50 nonprofit agencies.

Observers cite the giveaway as an example of Korenstein’s persistence and knack for moving the massive bureaucracy of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

It also illustrates the nature of most of her achievements on the board. Her strength is said to lie in dealing with administrative issues and being an advocate for teachers.

Korenstein, 47, will face City Councilman Hal Bernson in the District 12 runoff election June 4.

“Julie is tenacious about the things she is tenacious about, whether it is popular or not,” said Goldberg, who is retiring from the board in June. “If I had my druthers, many times I wish she would give up. But I admire her for not doing that.”

Goldberg said she had sought a food donation program years earlier but that staff administrators had dragged their feet. They feared that giving away food would risk lawsuits in case somebody got sick, Goldberg said. They also thought transporting the meals unspoiled would be a logistics nightmare, she said.

“Finally, fatigue sets in and you begin to believe there are so many obstacles that can’t be overcome,” Goldberg said. Then, she said, “Julie comes in with fresh energy.”

Korenstein resurrected the idea. By bringing it up repeatedly at meetings, she wore down the objections. Administrators eventually drew up legal papers to protect schools from lawsuits and contacted relief agencies to pick up and distribute the food.

Similarly, it is largely through Korenstein’s efforts that the school district recycles about 100 tons of paper and plastic foam products a week.

“At first, all I heard was that it was too much trouble and that it would cost too much,” she said. “But the recycling program has reduced costs to the district and created some revenue for the schools.”

Korenstein, a single mother of three and former part-time high school coordinator, has alternately surprised and exasperated colleagues during the three years and 10 months she has represented the west San Fernando Valley on the seven-member Board of Education.

She has been accused by board colleagues of putting white students’ needs ahead of minority students’ needs and of being a teachers union puppet. She has been on the losing side of the conversion to year-round schooling, the longest running debate during her tenure.

But even her opponents acknowledge she is reluctant to compromise on matters of principle. For example, she voted against board members having personal aides at school district expense, then donated her office’s $45,000 annual salary allocation to a kindergarten program.

She spearheaded a ban on the purchase of cafeteria apples treated with the chemical ripener Alar. She sought district recognition for the much-joked-about state Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.

Those issues drew smirks from critics who have branded her a policy lightweight.

Among some district staffers, she has a reputation as a nit-picker who likes to quiz the professional staff closely in public meetings on behalf of constituents.

“She’d better surround herself with some good people if she gets on the City Council,” said one district administrator who has attended many meetings with her.

Korenstein said she is not bothered by any of that. “People can laugh all they want, as long as we are doing the right thing,” she said. The government now bans Alar on food, citing a cancer risk.

On April 9, after winning 29% of the vote to lead five challengers for Bernson’s seat, Korenstein noted that it was her fifth election night in as many years.

Four years ago, before entering public office, Korenstein was part-time coordinator at Chatsworth High School, referring students to after-school volunteer jobs for class credits.

The woman who hired her, Principal Donna Smith, said Korenstein showed enthusiasm and was not afraid to ask questions. But Smith said there was little to indicate Korenstein would someday be one of seven people directing the nation’s second largest school district.

“I thought maybe sometime she would be a full-time teacher or counselor,” Smith said. “The kids liked her.”

In 1987, she won the unexpired term of school board member David Armor, who left Los Angeles to take a job in Washington.

Korenstein said she reluctantly decided to run. It seemed like a bad time. She was in the midst of a divorce after being married 24 years. She was a single parent.

“I called my mother a week before the filing deadline, and she said, ‘Do it,’ ” Korenstein said.

She made her first campaign promise to the cafeteria workers at Chatsworth High School.

“At the end of lunch the crews would take all the excess food, put it into plastic bags and stomp on it, which was the board policy at the time,” Korenstein said. “I told them that was the first thing I was going to change.”

With about $28,000 of hers and her mother’s money and more than $70,000 from United Teachers-Los Angeles and its affiliates, Korenstein was the top vote-getter in the primary election. In June, 1987, she defeated Barbara Romey to win the West Valley board seat.

A little more than a year later Korenstein faced a short-lived recall attempt by a group of parents angry over the transfer of Frost Junior High School Principal Gerald Horowitz.

In 1989, Horowitz used the support to mount a bid for the school board. Korenstein raised $180,000--again with strong teacher support--for the election primary and runoff. She defeated Horowitz and won her first full term.

That election came shortly after a chaotic nine-day strike that earned teachers a 24% raise over three years. The contract raised entry-level teacher salaries from $23,440 to $29,529 for the school year, which runs just over nine months. Those proficient in Spanish earn an additional $5,000.

Korenstein, along with Goldberg and harbor-area representative Warren Furutani, were those most sympathetic to the teacher demands. The East Valley representative, Roberta Weintraub, then board president, cast the fourth vote needed to sign the contract.

“The biggest thing she did for UTLA was to be incredibly receptive to our point of view,” union President Helen Bernstein said. “I talk to her only rarely, but if there is something crucial I will call her, and she will call me back.”

After the strike, Korenstein and Westside board member Mark Slavkin pushed to give the union the right to charge non-members an annual fee if approved by teachers in an election, a demand that the district refused to grant during the strike. Now all Los Angeles teachers pay fees to UTLA.

“When I first became a board member, teachers were so criminally underpaid that as a district we didn’t have a chance of getting the best college graduates,” Korenstein said.

Now they are among the best paid, even though the district is nearly broke. The board this spring is bracing to cut $341 million from a budget of just under $4 billion.

“The raise was not a mistake,” Korenstein said. “There was just no way to predict that the governor and Legislature would put education so far down on the priority list.”

Korenstein’s allegiance to the teachers union will be tested in coming weeks, as the board decides on proposals to cut salaries of all district employees by 7%, eliminate a week of paid vacation for teachers and increase class sizes.

The budget cuts come as increasing numbers of the district’s 625,000 students arrive at school from poor homes where English is not spoken.

Within the district, Korenstein’s white, middle-class constituency now represents a minority. She says she represents all students, but she is widely perceived by both admirers and detractors as defending the interests of West Valley residents.

Supporters such as Tarzana parent and attorney Malka Tasoff say Korenstein’s efforts are important in stopping the loss of students to private schools.

“The real dilemma is that people don’t want to put more money into public education,” Tasoff said. “Every time a neighborhood kid goes to a private school, you lose another vote for public schools.”

Tasoff and like-minded parents say Los Angeles’ mix of languages and cultures, the money shortages, the fear of having their children fall behind have pushed many parents to leave or consider leaving the city school system.

Korenstein has faced West Valley parents who worry about issues such as school crowding, school crime and the busing of nearly 20,000 students to the Valley from inner-city neighborhoods.

For the most part, her positions on the board have reflected her constituents’ views.

For example, she argued against year-round schools on the grounds that most West Valley schools are not crowded enough to warrant the switch, especially since there is no money for air conditioning.

She has fought against allowing greater percentages of minority students to enroll at the district’s magnet schools. These schools have special programs designed to attract children from outside the area and are designed to promote integration. Korenstein favors the current policy of reserving 40% of the seats for white children, even though they account for only 16% of the district’s total enrollment.

“It’s important for children to have an integrated experience going to school,” said Korenstein, who graduated from Los Angeles High School and Cal State Northridge.

At Korenstein’s urging, the school board dropped a longstanding policy of prohibiting a student who got an F in a course from participating in after-school activities such as athletics, drama and music. Students now are required only to maintain C averages.

The change was opposed by board members Leticia Quezada and Rita Walters, who represent parts of the city with mostly Latino and black students.

“There is a certain liberal philosophy that is very condescending, that minorities can only do well in sports and not academics,” Quezada said. “Those are excuses for having failures in school.”

She said the change was intended to keep more students in school, especially those who would have been dropped from a favorite after-school activity.

The classroom stabbing of a junior high school English teacher in Sylmar and the slaying of a high school teacher outside his Sherman Oaks home two years ago stirred fears among Valley parents. In response, Korenstein formed a 27-member task force to study how to accomplish the ambitious goal of “eliminating weapons from our campuses.”

So far, the board has done little with the committee’s recommendations. It did adopt a policy that requires district officials to recommend expulsion for any student who possesses a firearm on campus or seriously assaults someone at school.

Korenstein introduced the motion and successfully argued for it. Since then, however, she has repeatedly voted to reject expulsion in specific cases.

She explained, referring to the armed students and those cited in assaults, “the choice is letting them wander the streets and burglarize homes and shoot into campuses or get them into structured education programs away from campus.”

BACKGROUND

City Councilman Hal Bernson and challenger Julie Korenstein, a Los Angeles Unified School District board member, are vying for the District 12 council seat. Bernson was forced into the June 4 runoff election by failing to receive more than half the vote in an election April 9. The three-term incumbent received 35% of the vote, while Korenstein received 29%.