District’s Call for Parental Advice Stirs Coup Attempt : Schools: Demand for majority role for volunteers is unlikely to be adopted. But it could alter other reforms.

Hundreds of volunteers couldn’t resist the open invitation from Los Angeles Schools Supt. Sid Thompson: Come write a chapter on how to include parents in the district’s ambitious reform movement.

Three months later, Thompson and district leaders are confronted with an unexpected problem of their own making. The volunteers have staged a coup and demanded that parents hold the majority vote--and thus the power--on new councils that would make nearly every important decision at schools, from hiring teachers to setting a budget.

The 11-page report--born of intense frustration over a school bureaucracy that they view as being unresponsive to students’ needs--recommends an unprecedented transfer of power held by principals and school district officials, and threatens to complicate carefully laid plans already under way to reform the schools.

“Parents have reached a point of bubbling frustration that we no longer want to be advisers--we want to be decision-makers,” said Kathleen Dixon of San Pedro, one of three leaders of the parent committee. “This is an incredibly powerful message that I hope will be heard.”

Group leaders, who represent parents from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley, acknowledge that they do not believe their bold plan will be adopted as is. But their pledge to bring parent power to the forefront of district policy-making in the coming months has created a potentially volatile situation: finding a way to appease vocal parents who are demanding a role in the district’s unprecedented restructuring.

To move the restructuring along, Thompson asked anyone in the district to help devise recommendations for his review. After studying reports from 10 volunteer committees, he will bring his final proposal to the school board in April.

The restructuring plan calls for the elimination of regional offices. Instead, the district will be broken into clusters--autonomous groups of high schools and their feeder campuses that would share services such as maintenance and accounting that are now run from Downtown offices. Clusters would be free to design their own instructional programs to allow teachers to do a better job of tracking students from elementary to high school.

The parents group presented their demands in a two-hour meeting Friday with Thompson. He made no promises but “was incredibly receptive,” giving them reason to hope that the initiatives will get a fair hearing among policy-makers, parent leaders said. They have begun to lobby Board of Education members, whose reactions range from open-mindedness to skepticism.

“It is a proposal that the board is going to have to seriously consider,” school board President Leticia Quezada said. “What will happen in the process, I don’t know. But this is a voice that has gotten louder and louder.”

It is particularly vexing for the district that the parents’ plan to run all 645 schools through parent-dominated councils conflicts directly with the basic premise of the district’s highly promoted LEARN plan.

Under LEARN, school principals--not parent-majority councils--work in collaboration with parents and teachers to decide how to run their campuses. The LEARN blueprint, unanimously adopted by the board nearly a year ago, is purposefully vague when it comes to school governance so that school communities are free to tailor their own plans.

“Somehow we will have to steer between all of this and figure out what we will do,” Thompson said of the new parent plan. “I’m not saying yes, no, or anything in between. I’m saying they have given me a very definite feeling and it’s my intention to give it full-light-of-day discussion.”

Parent leaders said they carefully considered the LEARN blueprint in their discussions and they do not oppose the vaunted plan, which was developed over a two-year period with input from more than 600 business leaders, educators, parents and community activists.

“What we like to say is that LEARN is kind of a skeleton and we are helping to flesh it out,” Dixon said. Their goal was to find a way to guarantee that parents across the city will have a voice in school district affairs.

The proposal calls for parents to have 10 of 19 seats on a panel that also includes the principal, one other administrator, three teachers, two students and two non-teaching employees.

The council would have authority over student discipline, curriculum, staff training and the use of all school equipment. It would conduct an annual survey of parents’ needs and develop programs to ensure that those needs are met.

A similar parent-majority council would be set up at the cluster level. And yet another would function at a districtwide level. The Board of Education would remain in place as a policy-making body with veto power over parents’ recommendations.

School board member Mark Slavkin said he is reluctant to embrace their recommendations because of the LEARN conflicts. He refuses to endorse any plan that would impose a governance structure on all schools.

“A process built as carefully and thoughtfully as LEARN should not be discarded because a self-appointed group comes forward and says ‘that wasn’t our thing and we want to do it differently,’ ” Slavkin said.

Others community leaders and parents involved in LEARN, while saying the frustrations are justified, believe the plan would be a step backward for reform.

Recent district history suggests that the parents’ idea for school governance would fall short, like a similar proposal forged during the bitter 1989 teachers strike.

The union’s school-based management plan--which called for teachers to make up half of school council membership--has only taken hold in 92 schools because of lingering animosity between teachers and administrators and the lack of resources to help schools develop reform plans.

“The importance of LEARN was to get away from this ‘who is in control, who holds the most votes’ way of doing things,” said Genethia Hayes, director of Project Ahead, an education program run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I don’t want us in a mold once again as adults fighting for territorial rights, when what we should all be doing is working together.”

Parents, however, have no misgivings.

While other restructuring committees--made up mainly of teachers, administrators and district employees--met during working hours in cafeterias and conference rooms throughout the district, parents conducted their Saturday morning sessions in the board room. They took their places around the the big horseshoe-shaped board table and swiveled in board members’ chairs. Spanish, Korean and Armenian translators helped the ethnically diverse group follow the proceedings.

At times, their final Feb. 19 gathering took on the air of a sports assembly with parents applauding and cheering as they read aloud sections of their completed document. A section calling for parents participation at district labor union bargaining tables drew the loudest cheers.

“Parents have been pushed and pushed back, and more and more decisions are being made by teachers and administrators,” said Nereida Johnson, whose children attend Granada Hills High School and Sepulveda Middle School. “Since these are our children, we should have a major say in their education.”

Their ultimate weapon, parents said, can be fired in the voting booth, whether the occasion is a school board election or a statewide school voucher initiative to give them tax money to spend on private education.

“These are our children and the school district works for us,” Dixon said. “Board members are elected by us.”

Parents also want to have their say at school board meetings and asked for two advisory seats on the Board of Education, an idea that was introduced by school board member Barbara Boudreaux last month but was tabled when a majority of board members said the motion was vague and did little but give parents another advisory voice.

Several parent leaders said the school board’s unwillingness to embrace the simplest of initiatives in their plan makes them suspicious of the board’s true resolve to make parents equal partners in school reform.

“We wanted parent input on a firsthand basis and present it at the same time that decisions are being made,” said Walter Waddles of South-Central Los Angeles, a co-chairman of the committee and father of two elementary school boys. “I think they feel threatened.”

The parent issues have raised red flags with leaders of unions for teachers and principals who are reluctant to criticize the work of parent volunteers but believe the plan has overstepped parental boundaries in education.

“I appreciate their frustration, but the way they are going about this will only cause more hostility,” by pitting parents as a power group against administrators and teachers, United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said.

* EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT: Grant turns Cudahy school into a model for reform. B3