Colleges’ New Leader Is Not Short on Goals : Education: But Allan Jacobs must first deal with contract negotiations with teachers that have dragged on since March.

Allan Jacobs has drawn up a list, written in neat black script on yellow legal paper, of his nine goals for the Ventura County Community College District in the coming year.

Now he hopes the district’s teachers give him the time to start working on them.

Last Tuesday, the presidency of the district board rotated, as it does every year. Trustees elected Jacobs, 63, a former elementary and secondary school administrator, to head the board that runs the county’s only public system of higher education.

Although he will continue to make $400 for each monthly meeting he attends, as do the other trustees, Jacobs said he expects to find himself putting in more time than the approximately 12 to 14 hours a week he’s labored as a trustee.

Former board presidents say the responsibility is considerable. “As president, you must meet the needs not only of your district, but of the other board members and their constituencies,” said Gregory P. Cole, the board’s outgoing president. “You kind of take the weight of the district on your shoulders for one year.”

Jacobs says he is eager to get started on his objectives of continuing to build up district reserves, striking educational partnerships between the district and business and industry, and making structural improvements at Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges.

But first he must deal with the 1,000 full- and part-time faculty members, now threatening to strike over contract negotiations with the district that have dragged on since March. “I am very sympathetic to teachers’ needs,” he said. “But I think it must be on balance.”

Faculty members say they might have hoped for something more enthusiastic, but they are not surprised. Faculty members want a 3% raise in addition to a cost-of-living adjustment. District negotiators say not only is an increase out of the question, they must cut back on teachers’ health benefits to balance a tight district budget.

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In the past three weeks, disgruntled teachers have walked out of routine district-level meetings and held sickouts in an attempt to slow district operations.

“I think Jacobs has a little better understanding of the educational structure than others (on the board) because he’s been a part of it,” said Bill Robinson, the president of Ventura College’s Academic Senate. “The fact that he understands the financial and organizational structure better doesn’t mean he has more understanding of the faculty though. That remains to be seen.”

Jacobs came to the district board two years ago after spending his entire adult life in education. Beginning as a high school history teacher in Carpinteria two years after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Jacobs went on to get a master’s and doctorate in education at UCLA before working as a high school teacher, principal and administrator in La Puente.

While at UCLA, Jacobs met and married his wife Johanna, 56, a now-retired home economics teacher. They have three children: Andy, 32, a registered nurse; Matt, 30, a pilot for United Airlines, and Elizabeth, 28, an internal medicine resident. Andy and Matt both attended Moorpark College after graduating from high school, Jacobs said.

Jacobs came to Simi Valley in 1972 as the school district’s assistant superintendent for secondary education and remained there until his retirement in 1991 as the district’s associate superintendent for educational services.

Although he saw educational trends come and go in his nearly 40 years in school administration, Jacobs said he believes the institutions themselves have stayed pretty much the same.

“I don’t think the system changed as much as the students changed,” he said. “What we have to get back to is effort and self-discipline.”

A soft-spoken man who characterizes his politics as “middle of the road,” Jacobs said he comes to many decisions affecting the 26,600-student district after his own, disciplined study of all the issues involved.

He mentions as an example a candidates’ forum in 1991, when he was running for office. The moderator, he said, asked him if condoms should be distributed on the college campuses.

Automatically, he said no. Reflecting back, Jacobs said he meant that condoms should not be haphazardly distributed, but that “there should be a process for it.”

Nevertheless, his answer sparked a strong response. “I didn’t know this was an issue,” he said, adding that he soon discovered otherwise. The controversy over condom distribution in the district has led to a two-year overhauling of the district’s acquired immune deficiency syndrome policy and guidelines.

Surprised at the chord his answer struck, Jacobs went home and did some soul-searching. “I worked at it and worked at it and finally decided ‘yes,’ but not at taxpayer expense,” he said. Jacobs’ position has turned out to be the same one the board adopted last week in its monthly meeting.

Jacobs said he faces a similar quandary over the district’s consideration of a Moorpark College satellite campus in the Conejo Valley, designed to relieve projected enrollment tensions at the district’s easternmost college.

District officials stress it is only one of the options they are considering as they look to the future of the district.

Jacobs said he hopes district officials really are taking the cautious approach.

“I think we have to go carefully, slowly, and look at all the elements involved before making a decision,” he said. “We have to more effectively utilize the campuses we have first, I think. We have to maintain our high level of instruction.”

He added that he is interested in seeing the recommendations of a committee of community members that has been organized to study the matter. “I would certainly not reach any conclusions now,” he said.

Indeed, Jacobs is praised by other trustees for his inclination to negotiate and his knack for compromise.

“As district president, Al will look more towards group dynamics and not take individual initiatives,” said Cole, who acknowledges that he himself is prone to taking such initiatives. “He will be more patient than me.”

Trustee Pete Tafoya said Jacobs’ easygoing personality will help smooth over some of the tensions that have grown between the board and staff members and students at the three colleges.

“I think the friction will ease,” Tafoya said. “I think he’s more negotiative (than Cole) by nature. Al Jacobs obviously has a commitment to students, and that will bring the board closer to the students.”

Jacobs’ tenure follows a presidency laden with impressive accomplishments on the one hand and increasing college staff members’ distrust of the board on the other.

Cole, 42, took over the board presidency last December when the district was on the state chancellor’s watch list for having especially low district reserves and when the district was threatened with further deep cuts from Sacramento. In the end, the 1993-94 budget of $62.7 million was about $2.4 million more than district officials expected, though not nearly as much as they would have liked.

Board members say they are optimistic the district will soon be taken off the dreaded watch list, after drifting on and off it the past five years. In general, they say, the district is in sounder financial shape than when Cole began his presidency last year. And despite teachers’ salary grievances, board members note that while no across-the-board raises have been awarded, no one has been laid off despite the district’s budget cuts.

“Greg Cole has obviously been a very strong leader,” said Tafoya, who has sometimes clashed with Cole on political issues that came before the board. “He’s been very bold concerning initiatives with the board, and he’s very intelligent. I think he brought a strong focal point.”

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Conversely, Cole--with his determination to cut costs and his announcement as he took over the presidency that teachers should not receive a raise in the coming year--seems to have won few allies at the colleges.

Some staff members have become publicly confrontational with him. One teacher, speaking at this month’s board meeting on her frustration with the faculty’s contract negotiations, ordered Cole to stop giggling as she was speaking, causing such disruption among the audience that Jacobs had to bang his gavel repeatedly to bring order back to the room.

For his part, Jacobs acknowledged that consensus-building “is not (Cole’s) style.”

But, he added, “I think he’s worked hard at it.

“His presidency has been very statesmanlike,” Jacobs said. “He will be a tough act to follow.”

As he begins his year in office, Jacobs said, he will try to listen to college staff members and include them in the process of district decision-making. Already, he said, the presence of about 100 frustrated faculty members at this month’s board meeting, waving picket signs and lining up to inform board members of their anger over stalled negotiations, has left its impression on him.

“This focused our attention upon the fact that we have a lot of hard-working staff that have students as the main issue in their minds,” he said. “The depth of emotion and feeling that many of them expressed always catches your attention.”