NEWS ANALYSIS : Valley Schools Find Local Control Has Its Pitfalls

Those who tout local decision making as a panacea for failing schools might take a lesson from two San Fernando Valley campuses trying to make positive changes while facing lousy choices.

After months of acrimonious debate--punctuated by student sit-ins--North Hollywood and Van Nuys high schools dug in their heels and refused to adopt a year-round calendar to accommodate an impending flood of new students. Plans to keep the traditional school calendar will require inconveniencing teachers and probably force 200 students to ride buses to campuses outside their neighborhoods.

Once, such decisions would have been made unilaterally by the Los Angeles Unified School District board. But in recent years, the school board has shifted more and more authority to grass-roots decision makers.

A parent who participated in the process described her own feelings of frustration after realizing that local advisory panels can be as flawed as the district’s much criticized downtown bureaucracy.

“When we felt [local decision makers] became really dysfunctional, we didn’t know where else to go but to the board,” said Sue Sullivan, the parent of an 11th-grade student at North Hollywood High. “But that defeated the point, because we asked for local control.”

The idea is not only popular in Los Angeles but on the campaign trail, where presidential candidates regularly suggest that handing schools back to parents and teachers is a cure-all for an ailing educational system.

Now, the bitter spectacle at Van Nuys and North Hollywood is causing some people to wonder whether grass-roots decision making is a magic bullet or a poison pill.

School board member Julie Korenstein said that, as the debate raged on at the two schools, she began receiving unexpected pleas for help. “I can’t tell you all the parents that called me and begged me to make the decision,” Korenstein said. Their feeling was, “Enough of this local decision making.”

Far from indicating that local decision making is a failure, however, many experts say that what happened at Van Nuys and North Hollywood was an aberration. Much of it could have been avoided if the schools had been better trained in using their newfound power.

But it also shows that in an era of limited funds, with only harsh alternatives, it doesn’t matter whether the school board or parents make the choices: Somebody is going to be mad.

“That’s the issue. Which version of bad do you want?” said Guilbert Hentschke, dean of the School of Education at USC.

Hentschke and others said problems like those experienced at the two Valley schools should be expected when a district is changing the way it operates. “The idea may still have an enormous amount of merit,” Hentschke said of local decision making. “It’s the transition that’s painful.”

Board member David Tokofsky agreed. “There is a naivete that if you turn things over to the locals, that will come without conflict and a need for mediation.”

In recent years, no school board decisions have created as much controversy in the San Fernando Valley as year-round schools. The schedule divides youngsters into groups that are assigned “summer vacation” at different times of the year. It allows classrooms to be used all year, a far cheaper alternative to building new ones to accommodate the district’s bulging enrollment.

The schedule is now commonplace at elementary schools, but many Valley parents are still upset about their children taking lessons during the heat of July and August.

The recent round of troubles began when the district decided to reconfigure the middle schools that feed North Hollywood, Van Nuys and several other Valley high schools for grades six through eight. That will shift hundreds of ninth-graders into high school for the coming school year.

The change was part of a broader effort to improve junior high school education. Accommodating the flood of new high school students turned out to be a challenge.

The Board of Education weighed in first, voting 4-3 last month to put North Hollywood, along with San Fernando, Monroe and Francis Polytechnic high schools, on a year-round schedule to accommodate the extra students. Up against the same dilemma, Van Nuys’ Shared Decision-Making Council at first voted for conversion to a year-round school as well.

But local opposition soon developed to the idea of fragmenting students into different tracks. Some of the most vocal opponents at North Hollywood were the parents of highly gifted magnet students who would have started their fall semester in July. That would have prevented them from attending elite summer educational programs at campuses such as Harvard University.

At Van Nuys, some of the stiffest opposition came from students, who held two sit-ins.

North Hollywood Principal Catherine Lum finally decided on March 6 to scrap the year-round plan. Conducting a tour for visiting school board members, she said that seven large classrooms could be partitioned into two classrooms each.

At Van Nuys, teachers union representative Charles Wilken announced the school would also stay on the traditional schedule after a vote by the Shared Decision-Making Council ended in a deadlock. Some Van Nuys teachers are willing to give up having a permanent classroom. Instead, they would use other classrooms during periods when they are empty, said school officials.

Though the final decisions were mostly popular on the two campuses, some observers wondered whether the tyranny of one minority--the school board--was being swapped for the tyranny of another--a vocal group of parents and students.

Board member Jeff Horton said the magnet parents helped drive the final decision to scrap the year-round plan at North Hollywood. But he said they didn’t do it alone.

“In a sense, they prevailed,” he said. “But they prevailed because the situation became so dysfunctional.”

Horton said neither school involved various campus groups early enough or spent enough time ironing out differences. “As a result, the situation exploded,” he said.

In one way, Van Nuys and North Hollywood were simply lucky that they had options at all. Every school has a cap on the number of students it can accept, and those that far exceed capacity have no choice but to adopt a multitrack, year-round calendar, said Joyce Peyton, who heads the district’s Office of School Utilization. According to district projections, Van Nuys will be 45 students above capacity next year, and North Hollywood will exceed capacity by 167 students.

Van Nuys Principal Robert G. Scharf said the school can handle the overflow by ensuring that every classroom is fully occupied at all times.

At Monroe, on the other hand, capacity is 2,905 and projected enrollment next year is 3,500.

“Parents come to me and say, ‘We want to vote, too, so we don’t have to [go year-round],’ ” Monroe Principal Joan Elam said. “In our particular case, there are no options. I cannot put another 600 students on campus and maintain a safe campus.”

Even with the adjustments, Van Nuys and North Hollywood will probably put 200 local students on buses to other high schools.

That raises the ire of North Hollywood’s Tony Maldonado, a parent on the North Hollywood School Leadership Council.

“I don’t think it’s fair to send [local students] to Chatsworth or maybe Reseda,” Maldonado said. “When they live in the local area, they deserve to study at the home school.”

Horton agreed that busing is “bad for kids.”

Underlying all the difficulties was the failure to understand that just giving power to local decision makers is not enough if you don’t also teach them how to handle it, officials said.

Board President Mark Slavkin pointed out that neither North Hollywood or Van Nuys has adopted School-Based Management or the LEARN program, two recent reforms aimed at smoothing the decision-making process.

“A key part of LEARN is 18 months of training for the principal,” he said. “The focus is on developing leadership skills.”

He also said that the district must help schools adjust to their new freedom. “The district role becomes one of facilitator or coach to help the schools,” he said. “The district should learn from these examples.”

But he cautioned against generalizing about the experiences at North Hollywood and Van Nuys high schools.

“These two drew a lot of attention. I don’t want to paint a picture that there is chaos” when schools gain autonomy, he said. “The overwhelming majority make good decisions every day.”

North Hollywood and Van Nuys at least gained some experience for what looks to be more tough choices ahead. Enrollment in the district surged 12,000 students this year, to 650,000, and there are no signs that the growth is slowing down.

“I have a funny feeling that this will happen all over again for ‘97-98,” Maldonado said.