ELECTIONS / LOS ANGELES SCHOOL BOARD : 3 Teachers Challenging Slavkin in New District

Three past or present schoolteachers from the San Fernando Valley, one of them a former president of the teachers union, will challenge incumbent Mark Slavkin for the new Westside-West Valley seat on the Los Angeles school board this spring.

Slavkin’s stiffest competition was eliminated recently when Julie Korenstein, a board member who lives in Porter Ranch, announced that she will move to the mid-Valley and run for the seat being vacated by longtime board member Roberta L. Weintraub.

Slavkin, 31, remains the only candidate who lives on the Westside, where 60% of the voters in the new District 4 reside, but his Valley opponents all have broad backgrounds in the Los Angeles Unified School District and say they can overcome the geographical handicap.

When the filing period closed Jan. 25, Slavkin said he was looking forward to a lively campaign.

His rivals:

* Former United Teachers-Los Angeles President Judy Solkovits, 58, of Northridge, now handles negotiations for clerical unions at Walt Disney and Paramount studios. She taught for 17 years at elementary schools ranging from Darby Avenue School in Northridge to 118th Street School in South Los Angeles.

A board member of UTLA from its inception, she became the first woman to head the union, serving as president from 1980 to 1984.

Solkovits, a Pittsburgh native with a degree from the University of Minnesota, is married to a Taft High School teacher. A son teaches at Monroe High, and a son-in-law will begin teaching in February.

She charged last week that the school district is mismanaging funds and, in an apparent allusion to Slavkin, suggested that “any board member who voted for pay cuts should have been recalled.”

* Elaine Holzer, 53, works for the Pacoima Skills Center as a job-training counselor and runs a computer consulting and secretarial service. Holzer, who describes herself as “a local product,” attended Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles, UCLA and Cal Lutheran University.

She taught business subjects for more than 20 years--at Carver Junior High, Fairfax High and Manual Arts High--and was a career counselor at Monroe High.

Her platform includes restructuring the budget to control administrative costs, an independent audit, preventive programs to attack violence in the schools, a study of decentralizing the district, and the publicizing of what she contends are misappropriated funds and favoritism in hiring.

The divorced mother of a 30-year-old son, Holzer lives in Chatsworth.

* Douglas Lasken, 47, a second-grade teacher from Woodland Hills, has the perspective of parent and educator. The only candidate now teaching in public school, he has two children who attend public schools in the Valley.

“As a parent, I have had first-hand experience with the problems the district has had in the Valley and the increase in crime,” he said, “while I have also taught in the inner city and have a good understanding of labor problems and a keen awareness of the lack of management within my district.”

Lasken said he wants to contract out cafeteria services and implement other money-saving measures, air-condition Valley schools, and work for a decentralization plan that is “more than the fantasy of shared decision-making” to avoid the breakup of the district or state or county receivership.

And he is confident that if a Valley candidate can garner the bulk of votes in the Valley, where 40% of District 4’s residents live, that candidate could then force a runoff by getting only 10% of the Westside vote.

Born in North Dakota, Lasken has lived most of his life in Los Angeles. He graduated from Taft High School in Woodland Hills and attended San Francisco State. He earned a degree in English literature at the University of Minnesota and a master’s in education administration from National University in Los Angeles.

After selling two pharmacies he owned and ran, he turned to teaching in 1983. He teaches at Ramona in Hollywood. He has also taught at Normandie, Magnolia and Plasencia elementary schools, all in Los Angeles.

* Slavkin was a deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman for three years before his election to the school board in 1989, when he defeated an eight-year incumbent. Earlier, he worked for Assemblyman Bruce Bronzan (D-Fresno) in Sacramento.

The only non-teacher in the race, he is a graduate of Hamilton High and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from USC. He lives in West Los Angeles and sends his 5-year-old son to public school.

Slavkin said he hopes that the campaign will promote debate on the issues and generate interest among a generally apathetic public. Fewer than 15% of eligible voters turned out for the last school board election, he noted.

“I hope to use this campaign to mobilize a broad section of the public to participate, and my goal is to focus on who has the best plan to radically decentralize the school system and who can best make that happen,” he said.

Slavkin proposes breaking up the school district--eliminating his own job and the Board of Education--and replacing it with 50 autonomous high school complexes.

Only basic business services, such as food and transportation, would remain centralized, and even the agency handling those services would have to compete with private providers. The plan would allow parents to choose their child’s school and would peg funding to each school’s enrollment and the specific needs of its students.

All school board candidates must submit nominating petitions by Feb. 13 with at least 500 valid signatures from residents of the district in which they are running and a $300 fee, or at least 1,000 signatures with no fee.

The election is April 20, followed by a June 8 runoff for contests where no candidate gets a majority of the votes cast in April.