Skills Center Is Racked by Turmoil : Education: Critics say the vocational school’s principal should be removed for trampling on teachers’ rights. But Paul Davis says he is being attacked for making necessary changes.

The Venice Skills Center turns 25 this spring, but the mood on campus is anything but celebratory.

The vocational school in Venice’s Oakwood section is racked by turmoil, with mutinous teachers and some community activists pitted against a new principal who so mistrusts his colleagues that he no longer leaves important papers in his office and is certain his foes have forged his signature on personnel documents.

Critics are seeking to overthrow Principal Paul Davis, saying he has trampled on teachers’ rights and gutted some classes since taking over the 300-student school last August. Davis counters that he is being lynched by campus dissidents for making sudden but necessary changes in a foundering program.

When Davis turned down a transfer prompted by the flap, Los Angeles Unified School District officials called in a federal mediator to determine if his relations with the teachers can be patched peacefully--or if somebody has to go. The mediator, who was expected back on campus this week, may offer his evaluation as early as Friday.

“What we had was sort of an explosive situation,” said Trusse Norris, an aide to James Figueroa, who oversees adult education for the school district. “You have a situation where some people like (Davis) and some people don’t.”

The dispute between Davis and teachers began last fall over relatively routine changes in such areas as scheduling and the location of classes, but since has escalated into a struggle for control of the school, dividing students and spilling out into the neighborhood and even to meetings of the Board of Education.

“I have never seen the place so low,” Office Manager Sally Pena said. “The morale is so low. We have students against students and community members against community members, teachers against teachers.”

Some of the center’s 16 instructors charge that Davis, who also has been the principal at Venice-Hamilton Community Adult School since 1991, sought to replace them with his own hires by moving or getting rid of certain classes. Others have been irritated by Davis’s management style, saying he is arrogant and ignores teachers, students and community members in seeking to remold the school.

The skills center, whose nine bungalows house vocational and remedial classes for adults and dropouts, lost its previous principal to budget cutbacks last year and was placed under Davis’ supervision.

Almost immediately a campus outcry scotched a Davis plan to move the school’s learning center, which offers high school classes, to another Venice site. Teachers were also outraged when he had classroom telephones rendered unable to make or receive outside calls and when he announced that a VCR-repair class would be slashed in December.

“The man came in like a bulldozer and totally disrespected everything that was in place,” Jackie Petty-Wright, a computer teacher said. Petty-Wright is out on a stress disability that she blames on encounters with Davis over whether her outside consulting business conflicted with her teaching duties.

“It’s a power trip,” said Tony Fernandez, who teaches the VCR-repair class that was to have been canceled.

Davis, 60, and his allies maintain that he is a capable, long-time administrator who has fallen victim to a smear campaign by lax teachers resistant to reform. Davis acknowledges that he may have moved too fast. But he said he was simply trying to whip a drifting program into shape by eliminating classes that attracted and placed too few students in jobs.

“Every move I’ve made or attempted to make can be justified educationally and fiscally,” Davis said. “Unfortunately, there has been a cadre of faculty members who feel otherwise. They have orchestrated an effort to discredit my leadership--even to the point of involving students.”

After hearing reports that teachers were using classroom phones for outside work or personal use, he cut off phone use for all but a handful of teachers who he said need them for their work at school.

“It’s sour grapes. They’ve had their way for a long time,” said reading teacher Susan Scheding, a Davis backer who worked with him at Venice Adult School and joined the skills center last year. “These classes are not burgeoning. This is not a thriving skills center. I think Paul wants to make it that.”

Peter Bomba, an assistant principal at the Venice Adult School, called Davis an “open, forward-looking” principal who enjoyed great faculty support at that school.

Community activists have jumped into the act on both sides. Calls for Davis’ ouster compete with claims that he is being targeted because he is black.

Neighborhood critics say that Davis did not seek the backing of the Oakwood community before attempting to trim or move classes to other sites in Venice. Those complaints reflect a deeper sense that the skills center historically has failed to reach effectively into the poor neighborhood as an alternative to gang life and street crime. Oakwood students make up 10% of the center’s students at most, Davis said, adding that he wants to add to that.

The center, the smallest of five skills centers in the school district, has been buffeted by too-frequent changes in leadership and funding cutbacks in recent years, according to those on both sides of the current controversy.

Neither side was confident the recent damage can be fixed by mediation. Davis said if he is forced out he will try to keep his previous duties at the Venice-Hamilton Community Adult School. Pena said she will leave if Davis stays.

“I’m fed up with this,” said student Irma Ulloa, an Oakwood resident who has criticized Davis. “I want to concentrate on our work, not on him.”