LOCAL ELECTIONS / L.A. SCHOOL BOARD : 10 Candidates, 1 Vow: Reform

On one side of town, candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education say they will fight to hold the giant district in one piece. On the other end, they want to break it apart. One incumbent even proposes abolishing the very school board to which he seeks reelection.

The 10 candidates vying for three board seats in the April 20 municipal primary are also offering a wide variety of other antidotes--some tantamount to radical surgery--to pull the ailing Los Angeles Unified School District off the critical list: increasing funding, disbanding central administration, installing metal detectors at all entryways, giving parents power to select principals.

But across the sprawling, 700-square-mile district, two words reverberate: reform and restructure.

The candidates promise to usher in a new way of conducting business at one of the most pivotal times in the history of the Los Angeles public school system, which is buffeted by staggering budget cuts, needy students and labor strife. They are competing for seats in a district that is threatened with an intense and emotional movement to break it up.

They are also seeking elected posts that stand to have greatly diminished authority.

The school board two weeks ago approved a reform plan by the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) that will shift decision-making authority from the central bureaucracy to campuses, with principals in control of virtually every aspect of school management.

“What’s really needed now are board members who can work collaboratively and actually develop a vision . . . people who understand the role of a policy-maker,” said Genethia Hayes, assistant executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and director of a successful education program for the organization.

“They have to understand that in Los Angeles, the largest consumers of public education are going to be children of color,” Hayes said, “and that this job should not be seen as a steppingstone to broader public office. If they don’t understand that mandate, we are really going to be in trouble.”

Also marking the elections has been the virtual silence of United Teachers-Los Angeles, which typically gives money and campaign volunteers to its favored candidates. The union made only one endorsement, backing school board member Julie Korenstein, who is running in the District 6 race in the mid-San Fernando Valley. Her opponents are Eli Brent, president of the district’s administrators union; a teacher, and an electrical contractor.

Teachers union President Helen Bernstein said that the lack of endorsements in the two other races are a reflection of her union’s “deep distrust” of board members after a bitter contract dispute. Korenstein was the sole dissenting vote when the board in October approved a budget that included a 12% pay cut for teachers. The pay cut has been reduced to 10% in the recent contract settlement proposed by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

The school board elections come after a bruising reapportionment battle last summer that created a primarily Latino District 2, which stretches from South Gate and Boyle Heights to downtown Los Angeles and the Pico-Union district. For the first time, five densely populated southeast cities will be represented by one board member instead of four.

The highest-profile and most well-funded candidates in the District 2 race are both Latinos: former Los Angeles school board member Larry Gonzalez and Belvedere Junior High Principal Victoria Castro. In a sign of the importance of the voting strength in the southeast cities, both candidates opened campaign offices in the area.

Willene Cooper, a well-known community activist, is also in the running and intends to spend less than $1,000 on her campaign.

Gonzalez, 37, who moved from Highland Park to a Bunker Hill apartment to run in the new district, served on the school board from 1983 to 1987. This is not the first time Gonzalez has run in a new political district. In 1987, he waged an unsuccessful campaign against then-Assemblywoman Gloria Molina for the 1st District Los Angeles City Council seat.

For the past six years he has been the station manager at KMEX-TV. He intends to keep that position if elected to the school board because he believes that being a $24,000-a-year board member should not be a full-time job.

He has promised that he will not run for higher office and emphasizes his insights as a businessman and parent of two children in public school. He has raised about $42,000.

Gonzalez is opposed to the breakup drive and said that although he generally approves of the LEARN concept, it does not go far enough. If elected to the school board, he said, he will push to have greater parental involvement by creating elected school councils in which a majority of members would be parents.

Such empowerment is critical in the Latino community, where many parents are not citizens and lack voting power.

“To be eligible to serve on the (school councils), the only requirement will be to have children enrolled in that particular school,” he said.

Victoria Castro, 47, is banking on her hands-on experience as a schoolteacher and now principal to attract voters. Her message focuses on improving school safety, which she believes is the top concern among parents and students.

She advocates hiring a uniformed school police officer at every junior and senior high school and is prepared to eliminate or reduce staffing at the district’s regional offices to pay for more security.

Castro, who must quit her principal’s job if she wins, said as a board member she would work to create more partnership programs with private and other public agencies to help troubled youths.

“Until we have safe campuses, student achievement is not going to improve,” Castro said. “We need programs to help kids who are at risk.”

Castro--who has raised nearly $33,000, much of it from principals and administrators--is opposed to the breakup of the district because she says it would disenfranchise Latino parents. She also favors the creation of school-site councils with a majority membership of parents. She believes that budget-cutting decisions should largely be made at the school site, not at the school board.

The two other races are being waged in the Valley and the Westside in newly carved districts.

District 4 stretches from the Westside to Chatsworth in the northwest San Fernando Valley, with school board member Mark Slavkin facing off against Judy Solkovits, a former teachers union president, and Douglas Lasken, a Hollywood elementary school teacher.

Although Slavkin is viewed by many as a popular board member, his opponents hope that incumbency will be a liability.

“He is associated with a board that has poorly run the district for the last four years,” said Lasken, 47, of Woodland Hills. Lasken supports a plan by state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) to break up the district into about seven smaller units. He said the LEARN plan “is not an alternative (to breaking up the district) because it is not funded.”

Lasken would push to dissolve the district because “people in the West Valley are very disenfranchised. They are very angry, they are moving out.”

On the other end, Solkovits is opposed to the breakup because she said it will be costly, time-consuming and divert attention from what she says is the real problem: finding ways to raise student achievement. She said the LEARN plan should be put into effect as soon as possible.

Slavkin has offered his own unique remedy for the school system: abolishing the school board and replacing it with independently run “high school complexes,” composed of a high school and the elementary and junior high campuses that send it students.

He also has taken up one of the most controversial issues in the Valley and Westside: year-round school calendars. He recently introduced a motion that would allow high school complexes to decide whether their schools should return to the traditional September-to-June school calendar.

Slavkin has raised more than $20,000, compared to Lasken, who has raised $5,000, and Solkovits, who has raised $400.

The new District 6 incorporates the mid-San Fernando Valley. The seat is being vacated by veteran Valley school board member Roberta Weintraub, who is retiring.

Board member Korenstein, 49, appears to face a formidable opponent in Brent, 67, who has reported $17,000 in campaign contributions, many from school administrators and the district’s non-teaching unions. Korenstein has raised $6,000. Other candidates are Lynne Kuznetsky, an Encino teacher, and Richard (Ricc) Bieber, a Northridge electrical contractor.

Korenstein favors a separate Valley school district, but Brent wants to give the LEARN plan a “window of opportunity to succeed . . . If LEARN doesn’t work, then we should break it up,” Brent said.

Like Slavkin, Korenstein is seeking to resurrect the school calendar issue. She has offered a motion asking for a new calendar to be designed for Valley schools so that students will not have to attend class in the hot summer months.