County School Board Chief Hopes to Abolish Institution He Governs : Finances: Marty Bates says offices of education duplicate services and are a waste of money that should be going into classrooms. His sentiment is gaining support, but others strongly disagree.

Thousand Oaks businessman Marty Bates has an unusual goal for his first term as president of the Ventura County Board of Education: He wants to abolish the 122-year-old institution he governs.

“I’ve always said county offices of education for the most part are a waste of money,” said Bates, one of five trustees elected to oversee operations in the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Office.

“At one time, they were absolutely necessary, when we had a lot of little school districts,” he said. “But now, I firmly believe it’s a big duplication of services.”

Bates’ sentiment is gaining support from conservative critics of public education who question why the state allots $368 million each year for county schools offices in each of California’s 58 counties.

“Eliminate them completely,” said Coleen Ary, chairman of Simi Valley-based Citizens for Truth in Education. “They are a holdover from the horse-and-buggy days. We don’t need that extra layer of bureaucracy.”

The California Constitution Revision Commission, a statewide group seeking to shrink the size of government, would like to delete the position of superintendent of schools from the state Constitution, said Mike Dillon, a Sacramento lobbyist who represents all 58 county schools chiefs.

That could open the way for the Legislature to abolish the elected position and begin to whittle away at the office itself, Dillon said.

He thinks that would be a big mistake.

“People periodically will say, ‘Why do we need these county offices?’ ” he said. “And then you sit down and explain all they do and they start to change their mind.”

The state legislative analyst’s office generally agrees with Dillon and other supporters of county offices when reviewing functions and efficiency.

In a 1982 report--the most recent covering the county offices of education--analysts concluded that the services provided to school districts are valuable.

And because the offices cover entire counties, they provide routine services such as payroll preparation, teacher training and data processing more efficiently than can small districts, the legislative analyst found.

But they are less critical for large school districts--such as Conejo Valley Unified, Simi Valley Unified and Ventura Unified in this county--which have their own set of administrators, the report said.

*

More recent reviews by the analyst’s office have criticized county offices of education for taking too large a role in providing education for students who fall behind in traditional classrooms.

A 1994 report that looked at community schools--operated by the county offices of education--concluded that local school districts too quickly shunted off problem students into alternative-education programs, said Paul Warren, director of the education section of the state analyst’s office.

Local districts should be primary providers of schooling for vocational education students, dropouts, truants and kids who have been expelled, Warren said. If you let a separate institution do that, you let the local school districts off the hook, he said.

“It’s not a question of should they exist, but what is their role in the larger picture of education?” Warren said.

In Ventura County, county schools chief Charles Weis runs an office that controls a $34-million budget. The money is used to operate special education, instruction for troubled teenagers and schooling for incarcerated juveniles, as well as performing a variety of administrative functions for 21 local school districts.

Weis heads up a staff of 360 teachers, administrators and support staff. He earns $112,000 a year, making him one of the highest-paid public officials in Ventura County.

In contrast, Lin Koester, the chief administrative officer for the Ventura County government, earns $123,000 a year to manage an $860-million budget and a work force of 6,000.

In 1994, when many strapped school districts were turning down teacher raises and trying to scrounge extra dollars for classroom supplies, Weis and the county board approved the $1.8-million purchase and $500,000 renovation of a Camarillo building as their new administrative headquarters.

Such inequities suggest that there is fat in the education office budget, Ary said.

“Do you see that enormous building they have down there?” she asked, referring to the 40,000-square-foot, two-story office on Verdugo Way. “It’s a sign of bloated government at its worst. People who are concerned about taxes realize this is really an unnecessary office.”

Bates said that county offices of education date back more than a century to California’s rural past, when far-flung townships relied on a central office to distribute money and new curricula from Sacramento.

*

Now, many counties are urbanized and have several large, well-staffed local school districts. About 80% of existing county offices could be eliminated and the remaining offices reorganized to cover larger regions, Bates said.

That way tiny districts, such as Ventura County’s Somis Union and Mupu, and some rural Northern California counties, could still take advantage of the cost savings from using a centralized office, he said.

Large school districts could form regional networks to provide special education and other alternative-placement programs, Bates said. Payroll and other administrative functions could be bid out to private companies, he said.

“I’m not saying that this will reduce the taxpayers’ expense,” Bates said. “But at least the money will be going directly to the classrooms where it belongs.”

But Weis said that if county offices of education were eliminated, a similar organization would have to be invented to offer necessary services to school districts. Statewide, he noted, county schools offices spend just 0.6% of the total $29-billion education budget.

In Ventura County alone, the office distributes paychecks for 16,000 public school employees every month, operates an insurance pool so that local districts can get reduced rates, organizes about a dozen teacher-training seminars each year and coordinates a video and film lending library.

In addition, the office provides education for about 2,000 students who do not fit into traditional classrooms. It also organizes annual events, such as the academic decathlon and science fair.

The county superintendent’s office is responsible for making sure that local districts maintain stable budget reserves and are not making unsound financial decisions.

“It doesn’t make good fiscal sense for us to disappear,” Weis said. “The only services we provide are those the districts cannot do cheaper themselves. We are the Price Club of education.”

Weis defends the purchase of the Verdugo Way headquarters as a sound business decision. At the old headquarters in downtown Ventura, the county office was paying $100,000 a year in rent and had to pay for any repairs, he said.

“In five years, the Camarillo office will be paid off and the people of Ventura County will have this building,” Weis said. “And that will eliminate a cost that we would have had for years and years if we were still renting.”

Ventura County school leaders are among the staunchest defenders of the county office. Jeff Baarstad, assistant superintendent for the Hueneme Elementary School District, said fiscal managers constantly call the county for advice on how to structure budgets.

And the county offices offer education specialists that no one district could afford to employ, Baarstad said. For instance, one county employee specializes in making sure the credentials for all teachers remain valid and updated.

“Our district would never justify hiring someone like that full time,” Baarstad said. “But they offer that service to every district in the county.”

Baarstad said he thinks the criticism stems in part from differences Weis has had with Bates and two other conservative members of the county school board, Wendy Larner and Angela N. Miller.

The trio has consistently pushed a conservative Christian agenda, including voting in March to exclude AIDS Care and Planned Parenthood speakers from teacher-training seminars.

*

The three voted last month to reject a $500,000 vocational-training grant from the federal government if it is offered, citing concerns about an increased federal role in local education.

“I have some of the same political concerns about a federal presence in education,” Baarstad said. “But many of the services [the county] offers are critically important.”

Still, in this era of fiscal austerity, county offices of education will need to become more entrepreneurial if they are to survive, said Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Education.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the county schools office runs a satellite television network that beams teacher training seminars across the country, he said. School districts throughout the nation pay for programming, Hentschke said.

The profits are funneled back into the studio to produce more programming and may eventually help bring in more clients, he said. This type of centralized service is the wave of the future, Hentschke said.

“There are greater demands and fewer dollars,” he said. “And county offices will continue to come under close scrutiny.”