PERSPECTIVES ON D-DAY : One Person, One Vote (Eastside Excepted) : Schools: A 2-1 vote for a traditional schedule loses to a ‘consensus’ for year-round use.

The inequity is so stark, it’s startling.

Last year, the year-round calendar was the single noisiest issue on the Los Angeles Board of Education’s agenda. San Fernando Valley parents screamed about 105-degree classroom temperatures in summer; Westside parents decried the lack of camps in January. Parents everywhere denounced the cost of year-round day care for kids on different calendars. The school board, sympathetic, mandated elections at 544 schools--most in the Valley and the Westside--to allow them to choose a calendar. All but one elected to return to the traditional September-to-June year.

This year, 37 Eastside schools no longer deemed overcrowded were deprived of their right to the same vote. Instead, the Board of Education quietly ordered these largely Latino schools to set calendars by “consensus.” At my daughter’s school, Euclid Avenue Elementary in Boyle Heights, we held a campus election before the district’s new instructions came out. The traditional calendar won by a nearly 2-1 vote, 414-225. Yet a year-round schedule was declared the victor by “consensus.”

Come again?

As it turned out, this sleight of hand was conceived by the district staff and Helen Bernstein, president of the teachers’ union, United Teachers of Los Angeles; it gives teachers effective veto power over the calendar. Bernstein recently acknowledged that she and the superintendent of schools had come to an “agreement” to forgo elections on the calendar issue this year. Instead, they agreed to utilize a “consensus model” previously used only by schools requesting it for specific purposes. The board, with utterly no public discussion as to the impact on thousands of lives, went along.

Under this new “consensus” model, no change can be made unless four so-called equal stakeholders in a child’s education--three of them employee bargaining units, the fourth parents--agree. Because teachers at many schools prefer a year-round program, the results were predictable: If we parents wanted year-round, we got year-round by “consensus”; if we wanted the traditional year, we got year-round by lack of “consensus.” Heads they win, tails we lose.

Our school gained notoriety because the staff-dominated leadership council also claimed that year-round had actually won in a fair election: A so-called “ratio of equality” gave 6.3 votes to every teacher, aide, administrator and part-time cafeteria worker.

For a school that teaches democracy, what does this say to our kids? For a district that promotes parent involvement, what lesson does it send Eastside parents--that we and our children literally don’t count?

In case board members have forgotten how strongly they felt about this issue last year, let me remind them. Julie Korenstein said it was so obvious the year-round calendar “just wasn’t working” that she wanted to impose the traditional calendar and spare everyone the “tizzy” of elections. Jeff Horton said that to leave any schools year-round was to “abandon any commitment to equity.” Leticia Quezada said that leaving overcrowded schools on year-round calendar was “the biggest failure in my term on the board.” Mark Slavkin said that the voting “reflects a clear majority” for the traditional calendar.

So what’s going on here? Have they all changed their minds, or do they really think that Eastside parents can find camps in January, can afford year-round day care, can manage a family vacation when one child needs to be driven to school virtually every weekday of the year?

Most board members have now denounced Euclid’s unique “ratio of equality.” Yet all, so far, have remained mute on Bernstein’s public revelations and refused to give us the simple dignity of elections. Confronted with having to choose between the powerful UTLA and the American principle of one person, one vote, the board is about to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to send our school a team of mediators to develop a “win-win situation” that we are told will “save face” for the UTLA.

Sure, we’ll talk. But what happens if we refuse to compromise because we believe that a democratic vote is something you can’t yield on? We won with 65% of the vote. Bill Clinton won with a mere 43% and nobody asked him to go to mediation.