Minority Hiring Push Prompts City Schools Feud : Education: District’s attempts to meet goals of federal diversity agreement stir controversy over hiring practices.

Mira Mesa High School Principal Jim Vlassis was hopping mad.

Vlassis was about to advertise four vacancies among San Diego city teachers wishing to transfer to his school, including one opening to run new high-technology vocational classes on which Vlassis had spent a cool $48,000 for computerized equipment.

Now the veteran principal learned that the personnel department would list his July openings with an “OCR Requirement” notation--the initials for “Office of Civil Rights.”

In other words, only nonwhite applicants would be considered initially, throwing Vlassis’ plans into disarray because he already had identified potential candidates--all of them white--and encouraged them to apply.

But top administrators at the school district are cracking down on the more than 50 schools whose numbers of minority teachers fall short of federally mandated percentages.

Affirmative action coordinator Sharon Whitehurst decided that Mira Mesa and other schools with perennially low numbers of nonwhite teachers no longer would get the benefit of the doubt about hiring minorities.

“Principals who want diversity know how to increase their numbers,” Whitehurst said after Vlassis sent a caustic letter decrying the move to top district administrators.

Vlassis, whose views are shared privately by some other principals, touched off a storm of controversy that has reached Supt. Tom Payzant’s office.

“I have no problem whatsoever staffing the vacancies with qualified minorities,” Vlassis wrote in his July 6 memo. “But to exclude anyone from bidding on the position unless they are a minority is discriminatory and puts me in one heck of a bind” if they cannot be found.

Vlassis said he resented not being told ahead of time that the OCR requirement was being added to his postings.

“It’s a racist belief to imply that there are no qualified nonwhite candidates around,” Whitehurst shot back in an equally sharp reply. “If principals make a good-faith effort, they can get them . . . and they all know the OCR requirements.”

Payzant refused to comment directly on individual employee actions but said that, “while I’ve always supported employees who sound off on an issue that they have strong views about, they can sometimes expect to get an even greater and stronger response, and sometimes that response is very justified.”

The dispute brings to light the little-publicized diversity agreement, which was forged in the late 1970s with the federal Office of Civil Rights because the vast majority of nonwhite teachers worked almost exclusively at schools with almost all nonwhite students in nonwhite neighborhoods.

The agreement says staffs at individual schools should generally mirror the district’s overall minority percentages--specifically, that no school staff should be 5% below or 10% above the districtwide average of minority teachers. With nonwhite teachers making up about 23% of the district’s 7,300 teachers and other classroom employees, that means that no school should have less than 18% minority teachers for the upcoming year.

Mira Mesa is at 10.6%.

“There was the historical practice of placing minority teachers in minority areas,” school district attorney Tina Dyer said. That deprived white students of seeing nonwhite school employees in positions of respect and authority, she said. In addition, most district schools now have some minority students because of integration programs.

George Flanigan, personnel department director, said principals are “not ignorant” of the diversity requirements and must work more closely with his office to avoid confrontations.

“I just wish Vlassis had talked to me before sending off his letter,” Flanigan said. “I think we could have worked out” some compromise.

But carrying out the agreement has proved a complex and tedious task, one that Whitehurst said “has not always had a clear, conscious district policy” behind it.

In general, principals are supposed to monitor the ethnic representation on their teaching staffs, and those with low numbers are expected to emphasize minority hiring when they have an opening.

(Although there are a few minority-area schools with nonwhite teacher percentages near 50%, the district has put less emphasis on whittling their minority numbers down, in large part because those schools argue the need for ethnic role models for their students.)

In filling any position, schools must first advertise openings within the district to give teachers a chance to transfer from one site to another. By tagging a position with the “OCR Requirement,” a principal can signal to the district’s minority teachers that the school wants more diversity.

If there are no transfer requests from existing minority teachers in the district, the principal can then ask the personnel department to send over qualified minority candidates recruited from outside.

In that way, the district can hire a minority candidate and improve its overall ethnic percentages while avoiding having all the new minority teachers end up at less-desired schools, which tend to be those in predominantly nonwhite areas and to already have significant numbers of nonwhite teachers.

But, in practice, the system doesn’t work that cleanly.

Secondary-level positions require specialized teaching credentials, so a middle-level and high-school principals must work harder than their elementary counterparts to find minority candidates, whether inside or outside the district. There are also more openings each year at the elementary level. For that reason, a larger proportion of secondary schools fall below the district’s minimum diversity goal than do elementary schools.

Much of Vlassis’s anger resulted from his assumption that there are probably no minority candidates within the district for his technology core curriculum, given the overall lack of experienced vocational instructors.

“What do I do if there isn’t a qualified minority, since there probably aren’t 10 people in all of San Diego County qualified for this position!” Vlassis wrote. The requirement to give priority to a minority candidate could delay his filling of the position until school begins in early September, he said, meaning that 150 students on opening day might not have the technology class that they signed up for last spring.

“If they were going to put conditions on me, why didn’t they give me the courtesy of telling me about limiting my ability to hire?” he said in an interview.

Whitehurst disputed the attitude, which she finds is common among principals, “that good minorities just don’t exist. My point is that you should make a strong effort early to get one, and, if that good-faith effort comes” up short, then we’ll obviously be more understanding in how a position is filled.

“Even if the tech-core position could not be filled (with a minority), couldn’t Vlassis have been willing to push for a minority for his (nurse or special education) positions?” Whitehurst asked. “There has been a systemic pattern at Mira Mesa of not diversifying,” despite a growing nonwhite student enrollment of 21% Filipino and 15% Indochinese, she said.

Whitehurst, an African-American, cited her own experience while a math teacher at O’Farrell Junior High in 1976. The principal of Mission Bay High, anxious to add ethnicity to his staff, contacted her through a mutual teacher friend and encouraged her to apply.

Payzant criticized the “old-boy” network in which people “want to accumulate around them those who they know from other assignments or have met through district contacts, rather than taking a risk with someone who may have less of a track record.”

But Whitehurst conceded that the district has not always tightly monitored principals to see if they are trying to adhere to the diversity standard.

Last year, there were hundreds of openings across the district, including many for the first time in years at prestigious schools such as Mira Mesa and La Jolla, because of a financial incentive that led to the retirement of many veteran teachers.

Whitehurst said the district failed to push the OCR requirement, with the result that many schools did not make strong efforts to improve their nonwhite percentages appreciably. For that reason, she this year emphasized that more attention be paid to the civil rights agreement.

“I agree that last year we could have been more pro-active in meeting the issue in terms of transfers and reassignments that occurred within the district,” Payzant said.

He emphasized the distinction between bringing more minority teachers into the district--a difficult task given inadequate numbers nationwide--and improving existing diversity within the district.

For Payzant, the bottom line comes down to “the willingness of principals to take the objective of diversity seriously. There is a difference in the level of aggressiveness that principals take.”

Vlassis maintains that all principals, “everybody, is trying to recruit minority teachers, and that the (statements by Whitehurst) are a simplification of the problem.

“It’s not my main job to go out and identify people, and I don’t have the authority to hire people,” Vlassis said. “I depend on the personnel department” to send me candidates.

Other principals say there are times when they do identify certain teachers whom they want to encourage to transfer to their schools--minority or white--but that the personnel department needs to make the OCR stipulations more consistent.

“I’ve worked on bringing up my ethnic representation for several years,” said Barbara Brooks, principal at Point Loma High until last June. The school now has about 18% nonwhite representation on its staff. “I’ve often asked the personnel department to identify certain candidates for me when I’ve had an opening.

“But I have never heard of a particular percentage being required. I’ve never seen a printed figure, or heard of an OCR request being put on a” job advertisement.

Mike Giafaglione, principal at Bethune Elementary in Paradise Hills, said the search for ethnic diversity never ends, especially for his school, which now consists of about 75% Filipino students but about 22% minority teachers.

“I’ll always ask personnel to send me out a minority candidate to interview if possible,” he said. “You have to be pro-active.”

Schools with many Spanish-speaking students, and therefore in stronger need of bilingual teachers, generally have better ethnic hiring records because a majority of bilingual instructors are Latino.

“The language situation can make it easier to meet the affirmative action goals,” said Dennis Brown, principal at Pershing Junior High and a former personnel office administrator.

“But, without naming names, there are certain principals who always asked me to send them affirmative action candidates, and there are quite a few who actively resisted taking (such) candidates.”