THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Special Educator : Yvonne Chan isn’t shy about butting heads over school reform--or about promoting herself. But critics and fans agree: Endlessly devoted to her cause, she gets the job done.

Yvonne Chan walks into the luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills with a smile, stopping every few steps to shake hands or hug her fellow educators and political allies. By the time she finally makes it to her table--front and center and filled with some of the most powerful people in the education community--she’s clearly distressed.

“I want to sit with my friends,” she says to no one. “I don’t want to sit up here with the dignitaries. What am I doing up here?”

But the Pacoima elementary school principal certainly has no problem charming her lunch companions between bites of arugula salad and swordfish. She speaks Chinese with one, explains how money really should be distributed to schools and compares favorite restaurants with another.

Then, realizing she’s late for a faculty meeting, Chan snatches the floral centerpiece off the table, bounds out of the room and impatiently waits for the valet to deliver her 13-year-old Mercedes.

“What separates me from them,” she says of her table mates, “is that I’m working every day with kids and parents and teachers. I’m really doing it.”

What Chan, 50, has done in the last five years is help revive a school once known for having the lowest-achieving pupils in the San Fernando Valley.

Today, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center is known for Yvonne Chan, who won’t let bureaucratic obstacles stop her, who doesn’t easily accept defeat or rejection, and who expects the same high standards from her staff. Under state law, charter schools such as Vaughn control their own hiring, budgets, schedules and salaries--essentially all aspects of campus life. As its principal, Chan is equal parts entrepreneur, politician and educator.

Even her critics bow to her endless energy and devotion. Says one: “I think everything she does is about Yvonne and what makes Yvonne look good. But I suppose the children and the community at Vaughn should be grateful that she’s giving so much. She cares more about that school than some parents care about their children.”

Chan’s pride in the campus of 1,170 students is endless. She shamelessly promotes it and, by default, herself. A recent call from a “PrimeTime Live” researcher immediately propelled Chan out of her usual drill of meetings and paperwork and into media-response mode.

The tactic worked. Diane Sawyer and an ABC camera crew spent a February morning at the school for a May 3 segment on school-district bureaucracy, and Chan proudly displays the day’s souvenirs--photos of her and a few teachers with Sawyer.

Neither the school nor Chan is exactly hurting for publicity. Even before Vaughn Street School adopted its new name, broke away from Los Angeles Unified and became one of nine independently run campuses in the district two years ago, Chan knew how to get attention.

Upon arrival, she made headlines by pedaling a bicycle around the campus to make a point: footpaths had been blocked for too long as a district playground paving project dragged on. She taught herself to ride the two-wheeler the day before calling reporters.

At about the same time, Chan responded to what was then the largest drug bust in city history by organizing a community fair and parade--an attempt to engender pride amid the publicity surrounding the nearby cocaine seizure.

She has also had notorious public run-ins with the school system over money. She complains that the district withholds too much from campuses and that schools must pay for district services, such as instructional support, they don’t need.

She has also had great success winning money from outside sources, ranging from a $321,000 grant from the RJR Nabisco Foundation to smaller amounts from a variety of education donors and nonprofits. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in private funds, Chan has purchased computers for students and principals at Vaughn and neighboring schools, created a “family center” for Vaughn students and their parents, and even paid for a bus and some hotel rooms for a staff retreat to Las Vegas.

Her picture appeared in Time magazine as part of a report on school reform programs last fall, shortly after she announced that her overcrowded campus would expand through construction on the site of two neighborhood homes, one of which she called a “crack house.” The groundbreaking ceremony on Columbus Day drew local and state officials.

Sitting atop a bulldozer, wearing a hard hat and carrying a megaphone, Chan helped demolish the house.

“Vintage Yvonne,” says Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who attended the event. “She’s one of the best marketers around. She’s sort of the Gen. Patton of education. When everyone says, ‘No, that’s never been done before, we can’t do it,’ she’ll say, ‘Take the hill.’ And you do it.”

Chan commands the same respect from other politicians and education officials here and in Sacramento. And she has become a national spokeswoman on school reform, attending conferences and making speeches in Atlanta, Milwaukee, San Diego and Delaware in the last several months alone.

Delaine Eastin, state Superintendent of Public Instruction, recently tried to hire Chan away from Vaughn. Chan wouldn’t even consider it.

“I believe that she is one of the most talented educators in America right now,” Eastin says. “Yvonne is constantly saying, ‘Why not? Why can’t we? Why don’t we?’ I wish we could bottle that spirit and spread it around.”

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Whether she was born with it or acquired it as a child, Chan has pluck.

At 12, she and her mother fled communist China with the help of Christian missionaries. She eventually landed in an exclusive private school in Hong Kong, the only girl on a full scholarship who didn’t play either tennis or a musical instrument.

At 17, she borrowed $100 from a classmate, bought a basketful of inexpensive Chinese herbs and boarded a ship alone for the United States. Once in San Francisco, she sold the herbs for $300--her first business coup--and boarded a Greyhound bus for Fresno, where nuns from her former school had contacts.

She took on a hefty course load at a community college, lived with a family and went to work, illegally, washing dishes and packaging fruit.

A few years later, Chan headed south with all her belongings, hoping to see Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland. But she got sidetracked in Los Angeles, where she found hostess and waitress jobs in Chinese restaurants, including the now-closed General Lee’s in Chinatown. Eugene Chan, a Chinese American 12 years her senior who sang at a nearby piano bar, began courting her. They married 29 years ago.

Their relationship is one of “autonomous independence,” she says. In other words, they spend a great deal of time apart, even when in the same place. She works in an office at one end of the Northridge home she paid for, and he camps out in a wood-paneled den at the other. They keep separate bank accounts and divvy up the bills. Eugene works for a liquor distributor and plans to retire this summer.

“We have a few moments (together) then--boom--she’s back to the computer,” he says on a recent evening, moments before Yvonne dashes out to teach a course at Cal State Northridge. “We used to go to the racetrack together, and I’m betting horses and she’s sitting there doing schoolwork. Finally, we decided it was better if I went alone and she did her work at home.”

The Chans spend more time together on the weekends, reserving Saturday nights for dining out at a Chinese restaurant in the Valley or Monterey Park.

As a newlywed, Yvonne continued her education at UCLA, earning a bachelor’s degree in French in 1968. The couple had two sons in less than two years, and Yvonne’s mother eventually came to Los Angeles to help care for them. She died several years ago.

Eager to avoid the late hours of the restaurant business, Yvonne took a teaching job at a nearby private school, then called the Karden Academy and now known as the Curtis School Foundation. She figured that her sons, who would grow up to be an insurance salesman and an environmental scientist, could get a free private education.

Immediately, she was drawn to the special-education students, the ones who weren’t making it in the regular classrooms. She taught at Karden for eight years while earning a master’s degree in special education from California State University, Northridge.

Joyce Hagen, chairwoman of the university’s special-education department, recalls that Chan wouldn’t “leave anything left unlearned.”

“I always felt she would do something great with her talents,” Hagen says.

When mandatory busing in the public schools prompted a surge in Karden’s enrollment, administrators cut back on special-education classes, Chan recalls.

So, in 1976, she jumped to Los Angeles Unified. She spent nearly eight more years teaching special education before being tapped as an adviser, then an assistant principal. She became a principal in 1986 at Sylmar Elementary School.

Four years later, her boss, Assistant Supt. Sally Coughlin, asked her to take on what was, by all accounts, a mess: Vaughn Street School. Teachers were filing grievances against administrators, parents were completely left out, and the students had the lowest test scores in the San Fernando Valley.

Chan jumped at the challenge and hasn’t looked back. Vaughn is now one of about 200 finalists for the state education department’s coveted Distinguished School Award. The winners will be announced later this month.

Ed Reiter, a sixth-grade teacher who has worked at Vaughn for 30 years, credits Chan with breaking down the warring factions and immediately improving morale.

Among her top priorities was to involve the mostly poor, Latino parents in school activities. While many administrators rarely stray beyond schoolhouse gates, Chan seized any excuse to leave campus to meet parents and neighbors.

Until recently, she visited truants’ homes to ask why the youngsters had been absent and to encourage parents to attend campus events. The school now employs a parent to check up on the habitually missing; attendance has jumped from 88% a decade ago to 98% this year.

Jorge Lara, whose daughter attends Vaughn, says Chan motivates parents, including him, who would otherwise keep their distance. He now works at the family center as a liaison between the school and the parents, making home visits and intervening when problems arise.

“She helped us get involved and learn the system,” Lara says. “She’s done wonderful, wonderful things, but now she has to stop being a lone ranger and say, ‘Yes, we’ve got everybody helping and they all (can) make decisions.’ ”

It’s a criticism heard over and over. Parents, teachers, even Chan admits that she sometimes boasts about accomplishments without giving credit to those responsible.

Some fellow principals and district administrators roll their eyes when asked about Chan. They say that her hard-working staff rarely gets its due and that many others in the district deserve as much or more recognition.

Chan says she wants to pass on her can-do management style to teachers. She says she looks forward to grooming future administrators and leaders--people with the guts to challenge authority without concern for their political destiny.

But for now, Chan says she doesn’t see anyone who can take her place, who wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone to call a legislator in Sacramento or the superintendent in Los Angeles.

Joe Rao, a district administrator who works with the charter schools, says Chan doesn’t hesitate to break the chain of command.

“Does she make my life difficult? Yes,” he says. “But in a positive way. She pushes the envelope. I respect her very much. She drives me crazy, but I respect her.”

Rao dismisses criticism from other administrators with one word: Jealousy.

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Under Vaughn’s charter, every decision, from curriculum to hiring, is debated and decided by committees made up of everyone from parents, custodians and cafeteria workers to teachers and administrators. Their latest accomplishment is adding 20 days to the school year, bringing the total to 200.

As a result, Chan operates more like a chief executive officer than a principal. Her schedule one recent week calls for a lunch in Beverly Hills and another Downtown at the exclusive California Club, an appointment with U.S. Department of Agriculture auditors, three faculty meetings, a lecture for her special-education class at Cal State Northridge, a computer session to teach Vaughn faculty to use new software, and an afternoon meeting with principals in the Pacoima-San Fernando area.

She also answers dozens of telephone calls, including one from a school-board member seeking an endorsement for a reelection campaign. (Chan offers money but no endorsement, saying she doesn’t want her name on “political propaganda.”)

It’s no wonder she develops laryngitis. Between meetings and still more telephone calls, she pumps throat spray. She teaches her Cal State Northridge class using a combination of sign language and a microphone, and she drinks countless cups of tea. Throughout the day she changes shoes, trading in her high heels for flats when she treks across campus.

She works in her office until 5 or 6, then packs a briefcase with enough paperwork to keep her in the home office until 11 or later.

What drives Yvonne Chan? The desire to succeed, she says, for the students and the teachers at Vaughn.

But some teachers see a more selfish motive.

“Yvonne does all these things head-on and we--the teachers--are left to make everything come through,” says Stephanie Moore, a sixth-grade teacher at Vaughn who has clashed with Chan over the years. “Why do we keep piling more and more on? Because she wants it. Because she wants to be successful.”

As for her destiny, Chan declines to say where she might be in five or 10 years. Although she owns two crystal balls and believes in fortunetelling and the sayings of Confucius, she will not predict her future.

“I’m a facilitator,” she says. “I’m a doer. I’m not a planner. What joy would I have in the Legislature or the City Council?

“I like my job,” she says, smiling. “No, I love it.”

Yvonne Chan

Age: 50.

Native?: No. Born in Hong Kong; raised in Canton, China; lives in Northridge.

Family: Married with two sons.

Passions: Work, languages (she speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, French and Spanish), computers and cooking.

On her belief in fortunetelling: “I picked the day I came to (Vaughn). I read the Chinese calendar and I picked the day. I think I really picked my time and I really believe that certain things happen when they’re meant to happen.”

On her work ethic: “I never ask people to do things I can’t do or wouldn’t do. I don’t believe things just come to you; you always have to work hard. The reality is, I want to make sure things are right. I don’t want to retire with an ulcer because things are not right.”

On the folder filled with press clippings on herself and her school: “One day I want to use this to train people about the press. What many people don’t realize is, it’s a two-way street--we get information out to our benefit, and the newspapers or television cameras get a good story.”