Hiring of Trustee’s Son Stirs Debate About Ethics : Policy: School board member’s son gets security job despite initially ranking second to another applicant. Some officials call for conflict of interest guidelines.

The school board is under fire for hiring a board member’s son as a security guard even though he was not the highest-rated candidate for the job.

The controversy flared after the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District board decided to hire the son of newly elected board member Mary Lou Gomez during her first board meeting last month. Gomez abstained from the vote, but she acknowledged later that her son, David Perez, had asked two board members to recommend him for the job.

Perez, 25, had ranked second out of eight candidates for the security guard job at Glenn High School in Norwalk, officials said.

Gomez said she had done nothing wrong. “I did not make any phone calls. I did not get involved in the process,” she said. “To my knowledge everything has been legal.”

The board’s decision to hire Perez angered many district employees and prompted one board member to urge the adoption of an ethics code that would ban the future hiring of board members’ close relatives.

Several times in recent years, the most qualified candidates for jobs have been bypassed after board members or high-level district officials intervened, employee union officials said.

“It has been going on for a while and getting worse,” said Richard Ruether, executive director of the school system’s teachers union. “Employees don’t like to hear that the hiring and promotion process is going on this way. We need a code of ethics.”

Rudy Bermudez, the only board member to vote against hiring Perez, said he asked district staff to research and develop a hiring-ethics code after about 30 district employees called him to complain.

“There has to be an end to this,” Bermudez said. “We can’t have board members abusing their positions so that their family members benefit at the expense of qualified applicants.” He added that other board members had asked him not to “buck the system.”

Supt. Robert Aguilar did not comment directly on the hiring controversy, saying only that board members have always behaved professionally. He added that he would look into the proposal to create a code of ethics.

No board member has come out against such a code, and most expressed general support for the idea, including Gomez, a preschool teacher and 17-year district employee before she took a leave of absence to run for office.

“I know of past board members who talked to every single person on a (hiring) panel and said, ‘I want this person hired,’ ” she said. “Oddly enough, that is when I decided to run, because I wanted a fair process.”

The controversy over Perez’s selection began after a hiring committee ranked him No. 2 for the guard position, the union’s Ruether said. A district official, whom Ruether would not name, intervened, along with board members Salvador Ambriz and Lupe Flores McClintock.

Ambriz and McClintock said they acted only as references and exerted no pressure on the hiring committee. They said they knew Perez personally and felt comfortable speaking on his behalf.

“I’ve known the young man since he was in elementary school,” McClintock said. “He went to school with my brother and sister.”

After the calls from board members, the committee flip-flopped the top two choices, Ruether said. Supt. Aguilar then recommended that the board hire Perez.

The candidate who lost out was female and bilingual, two qualities listed as priorities for the position, according to a member of the hiring committee. Both the top-rated candidate and Perez were highly regarded substitute security guards, the committee member said.

Perez, a graduate of the school where he now works, said he wanted only to be judged on his qualifications, and that he asked his mother to play no part in the hiring process.

Board member Bermudez wants to prohibit hiring the parents, spouses, children or dependents of board members. And he wants to bar board members from participating in promoting or disciplining relatives already working for the district.

Such a policy is necessary to keep the hiring process fair, said Betty Myers, president of the district’s union for non-teaching employees. Other than approving or denying the staff recommendation, “a board member should not have any say in the hiring process,” she said. “They should not make phone calls. They should not do anything.”

Besides Gomez, two other trustees on the seven-member board have relatives on the district payroll.

Cathi Moreno, wife of board President Armando Moreno, became a district secretary Oct. 1, 1986, three years before Moreno was elected.

The district hired three members of McClintock’s family before she took office on Nov. 30, 1989. Her mother, Alicia Flores, hired Nov. 24, 1986, works as a teacher’s aide for handicapped students at John Glenn High School; her sister, Alicia Flores-Gonzalez, hired Sept. 4, 1987, works as an attendance and welfare specialist at the district office, and her brother-in-law, Louis Gonzalez, hired Sept. 1, 1989, teaches at Nettie L. Waite Elementary School, according to personnel records.

“Some of the points that have been brought up are good,” McClintock said of the ethics proposals. “I hope we’re not going to be discriminating against people just because they are board members’ relatives.”

Such connections inevitably lead to conflicts of interest, however, when decisions are made on raising salaries and benefits or on whom to lay off in tough economic times, district labor officials said.

“The traditional way of dealing with the problem is that board members in most school districts publicly declare a conflict of interest and abstain from voting in anything that benefits their relatives,” said the union’s Ruether. “Since three board members have relatives, is it appropriate for them to participate in some kinds of votes?”

Ruether noted that three of the seven board members would face conflicts of interest if they voted on such crucial issues as employee contracts. “We’ve never had so many board members impacted this way,” he added.