The ‘Principal’ Ingredient Is the Secret to the Recipe : A healthy serving of parental activism nourished the mini-movement to give Norm Isaacs his just desserts--the top post at Millikan Middle School.

We did it. We won the LAUSD Principal (not to be confused with Pillsbury) Bake-Off. On Aug. 1, Norm Isaacs became principal at Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks.

“How did you do it?” you ask. “What was your winning recipe?”

One can’t be sure of the exact proportions. We call it Don’t Take No for an Answer Rolls. Perhaps it was the full cup of L.A. Times articles a couple of weeks before, the several dozen spoonfuls of phone calls and faxes to media, City Council people, Board of Education members and Los Angeles United School District offices, the soured visit to Assistant Supt. Dan Isaacs, the pinch of Valley Perspective column by yours truly, and the five-person team that visited Supt. Sid Thompson to see if we could get our bread to rise the way we “kneaded” it. Roll out the dough in bigger-than-fist-size pieces and throw ‘em into a hot oven with Break Up the District Stew by chefs Paula Boland and Tom Hayden, and you’ll know we were cooking a heavy-duty menu.

Of course we don’t want to forget the time in the kitchen that Norm Isaacs spent as assistant chef, cooking up effective projects for our children and encouraging us all to be involved by his own tireless example.

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So now we have won the bake-off. What are we going to do with the prize? Well, we had invited the town to come over to barbecue the LAUSD on a spit. But once we found out that our recipe was successful, we decided instead to serve up congratulations and feed the morale-hungry masses with ways to become more involved with Millikan, such as cleaning the school, helping in the library or with after-school activities, fund raising and more.

What’s the shelf life of our winning recipe? A very long time, we hope. We’re planning to serve up healthy portions of Millikan Don’t Take No for an Answer Rolls and Parents Pull No Punches Punch every chance we get, just to make sure our kids get a balanced education.

All this talk of metaphorical food has made me hungry, so if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get a bite to eat. In the meantime, you can let this digest: I hear Sun Valley Middle School is giving a version of our recipe a try. I’ll bet it will also be a winner.