Burbank : Superintendent Ends Turbulent Tenure

In a month, Arthur N. Pierce will step down from his sometimes stormy but accomplished seven-year tenure as the superintendent of the Burbank Unified School District.

He leaves behind a school district of 12,755 students that is wrestling with issues such as increasing ethnic diversity, overcrowding in elementary schools and the deteriorating physical condition of many school buildings.

Hanging over his head--even as he spends the summer relaxing at a family cottage on an island near Maine--is a lawsuit filed recently by the former principal of Burbank High School, which charged the district with racial and sex discrimination.

Many say Pierce helped guide the district through its most troubling financial times by cutting mostly administrative positions instead of teaching jobs.

That strategy helped patch up the antagonistic relations between district administrators and teachers, whose last pay raise was 1.25% three years ago, according to the Burbank Teachers Assn.

Pierce, 58, said he is resigning from the school district to be closer to his grown children, and is hopeful about finding another job on the East Coast.

School board members have not begun the search for a new district head, but they expect to have the position filled by September.

Pierce’s biggest regret has been the district’s inability to repair and refurbish its aging facilities. A $100-million bond measure intended to do just that failed in April, but many in Burbank do not blame the superintendent.

Pierce considers one of his biggest accomplishments to be balancing the district’s budget. In 1987, he said, Burbank schools were faced with a deficit of about $500,000. But for the fiscal year ending this month, the district expects to be in the black by $1.6 million, primarily because Pierce slashed about 40 jobs between 1989 and 1992.

In 1989, Pierce helped turn Burbank’s junior high schools into middle schools, a process that pushed ninth-graders into high school and sixth-graders into middle school, and resulted in readjusting the curriculum.

“There were difficult decisions to be made relative to budget cuts, but he made the needs of students a priority,” said school board president Denise Lioy Wilcox.

Even one of the most visible critics of the district, Keiko Hentell, had kind words for Pierce. Hentell filed a lawsuit against the district in May, claiming she was demoted from her job as principal of Burbank High School as the result of her work with minority groups on campus.

“My feeling for him is very positive,” said Hentell, who is Japanese American. “I think he brought the district through a number of trying things. He also used budget cuts as an opportunity.

“Truly, his keeping budget cuts as far away from the classroom is an extremely difficult thing to do for a superintendent, and he did it.”