Orange School Board Majority on a Mission

The conservative majority of Orange Unified’s Board of Education may seem an unlikely foursome to lead an educational crusade that their campaign literature promises will restore local control and family values to the long-troubled district.

The current board president was arrested for trespassing during a protest at an abortion clinic and ran his 1993 election campaign with an electronic surveillance bracelet around his leg. Another board member deemed his daughter’s district school inadequate after a classroom Halloween celebration offended his religious beliefs. He is now teaching her at home.

A third likened the federal government to a “drug dealer” that dispenses money to schools and gets them hooked on misguided programs. And the fourth, daughter of a New York union organizer, is determined to break the hold of the district’s teachers union.

In the past year, the four--Martin Jacobson, Max Reissmueller, Bill Lewis and Maureen Aschoff--have coalesced into a unified voting bloc on the seven-member board and launched an openly partisan campaign to implement what they call “the Republican agenda” for education: more privatization of services, less government, cuts in social services and a renewed emphasis on fundamental reading, writing and arithmetic.

The result has been heightened tensions on the board and instances of community outrage over several proposals.

The three board members in the minority--Rick Ledesma, James Fearns and Robert H. Viviano--say they are often left exasperated.

Ledesma, who describes himself as conservative, maintains the majority’s decision-making style is unnecessarily divisive.

“There seems to be a need to hit people over the head, to create pain, rather than to just make the decision and take the heat,” said Ledesma, who won a seat in 1993 promising to bring stability to the district’s wobbly finances.

Added Fearns, “I don’t know what’s going to pop out of the bag next.”

With more than 80 open school board seats countywide in November, Orange Unified’s conservative majority may soon have company. Conservative groups such as the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition and the Tustin-based Educational Alliance, which contributed $1,250 toward electing Aschoff and Lewis in 1995, are eager to claim more school boards.

“People are fed up with what they see going on in education,” said Mark Bucher, co-director of the Educational Alliance, which dispersed $36,000 to three dozen school board candidates countywide in 1994. “We will win more seats. Give us time.”

The Educational Alliance grew out of the failed school voucher initiative in 1993 and, like the Orange Unified majority, supports a back-to-basics approach that emphasizes “American” values rather than multiculturalism. The group, which claims about 1,000 volunteers, offers unqualified praise for Orange Unified’s groundbreaking efforts.

“The best thing they’ve done is to create a debate about the proper role of schools,” said Bucher, 37, who downplays the influence of religion in the organization. “They’ve said schools should not be asked to be hospitals or medical clinics--they should just educate children.”

That creed has met much controversy in one of the county’s largest school districts, serving 27,000 students in Orange, Villa Park and parts of Anaheim Hills, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

In its most high-profile move, the Orange Unified board earlier this year sought to prohibit one of its elementary schools from accepting any government grants not strictly devoted to classroom instruction. Ultimately, the board decided to consider each grant proposal on a case-by-case basis rather than issue a blanket prohibition.

Despite the controversy, Orange Unified trustees say they have no plans to back off their agenda in the coming school year.

They are preparing for a showdown with the teachers union over its health trust fund, which the board majority contends has overcharged the district $2 million in premiums. The most stringent critic of the fund is Aschoff, whose father was an organizer for an electricians union in New York.

Teacher representatives of the union, the Orange Unified Education Assn., have said no overpayments were made and they have labeled the controversy, which has gone to arbitration, a “witch hunt.” Union leaders are concerned an unfunded retirement benefits program could eventually bankrupt the district by depleting the general fund. Union leaders fear the board will exploit the problem to bash the union and destroy the benefits trust.

The board majority also has vowed to privatize the food services, even though it’s one of the best-run departments in the district. Its past success isn’t the point; competition breeds efficiency and profit, board members say.

The majority on the board sees any controversy it may engender as a small price to pay for realizing its agenda.

“I feel very strongly about things,” said Jacobson, a self-employed accountant. “It’s fairly easy for me to make decisions. There’s some tough decisions, but pretty much everything is black and white to me.”

Although school board races are nonpartisan, few candidates in Orange win election without at least the tacit support of either Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange), state Sen. John R. Lewis (R-Orange) or Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove).

“If you want to be elected and if you’re not endorsed by at least Lewis or Conroy, you might as well go yell up a drainpipe,” said a former Orange Unified trustee who again plans to seek local office and asked not to be identified.

Such was the case with the majority four, who were also aided by conservative organizations.

Jacobson, who is now the board president, and Reissmueller won election in 1993; Aschoff and Lewis were elected in 1991 and again in 1995.

Although none of the four trustees was directly recruited to run by the Republican trio, they did submit to questioning from the politicians or their aides.

“It was just a few questions really,” said Jacobson, who met with Conroy and Lewis. “They just wanted to make sure our views were in line with their philosophy.”

With the coveted endorsements, and backing from the Pro-Life Political Action Committee, the trustees benefited from the Republicans’ resources and close allies. Aschoff’s 1995 reelection campaign--where conservative groups helped her amass a campaign chest of more than $26,000, according to campaign finance statements--provides a good example.

Conroy directed the incumbent Aschoff to his political consultants and gave her access to a list of his constituents’ telephone numbers. And Sheldon, of Anaheim’s Traditional Values Coalition, even mailed an 11th-hour flier on her behalf to congregants and other voters. Aschoff easily outdistanced her opponent, taking 56% of the vote.

Still, once on the board, the conservatives did not coalesce immediately because they faced numerous obstacles--political inexperience and a crisis over lawsuits stemming from a harassment scandal involving top district administrators.

The board spent $400,000 in legal fees and countless hours pressing a sexual harassment case against a former superintendent and two other administrators that ultimately was dropped for lack of evidence.

The board also was slowed by a string of near-disasters even as the district earned a reputation for providing a top-notch education. Over the past few years, the district survived fiscal policies that almost led to a state takeover, labor strikes, and a run of eight superintendents in two years.

But last year, with much of those problems resolved, today’s four-member conservative voting bloc emerged.

“It took awhile to really get the feel of public office, for each other, and what we could do,” said Jacobson, who proudly regards his abortion protest, which earned him 30 days under house arrest, as an act of civil disobedience.

Among the board’s majority, it is 27-year-old Reissmueller whose background seems to be the most troublesome to the majority’s detractors. A fundamentalist Christian who interprets the Bible literally, the father of four withdrew his oldest daughter from Chapman Hills Elementary, in part because he objected to the school’s celebration of Halloween, which he regards as a pagan ritual.

He and his wife began a program of home-schooling, filing papers with the state naming his home as Orange Christian Academy and listing himself as principal, his wife as teacher and his daughter as the student body.

Reissmueller said he supports the concept of public schools, but does not want his children to attend them.

“I prefer to have some religious studies in my daughter’s education,” he said of his reason for home-schooling. “I don’t believe in [the theory of] evolution. I also just like the fact that I don’t have to worry about what kind of questions are being asked on tests.”

Public schools would fare better if they took a sterner approach to discipline, Reissmueller added.

“Corporal punishment is something I think our system is severely lacking,” he said.

Such sentiments concern his detractors.

“It’s his one-track mind, his single-mindedness to the destruction of the public school system,” said Dave Reger, president of the teachers union. “It bothers me that he has so little faith in the public school system that he home-schools his own children. If he doesn’t believe in public education, why is he sitting on the school board?”

Reissmueller and the other members of the majority pay little heed to criticism, which they attribute to disgruntled teachers and a small, if noisy, segment of the electorate.

Forging ahead last summer, the new majority flirted with establishing a multischool charter system, which would free the district from most state laws governing teacher credentialing, curriculum and financial management. The notion incensed the teachers union, among others, and the board backed off. It has pledged to reintroduce the plan this year.

But to many critics, the charter school proposal paled in comparison to the board’s unprecedented attempt this spring to ban grants for all social services at the district’s 37 campuses. The board majority argued that schools should focus exclusively on academics and not burden themselves with addressing social ills.

The trustees proposed the ban after Lampson Elementary School in Garden Grove received a $25,000 grant to help pay for a counselor and a family resource center on campus. Those funds were part of a wide-ranging program that has raised more than $200,000 to help poor children and their parents.

To the board, Lampson Elementary, where three-fourths of its students benefit from extensive social programs, symbolized the worst of the “welfare state.”

But in the face of community opposition--about 400 parents, teachers and community members attended an April board meeting to protest the trustees--the board abandoned the prohibition on grants, but promised to review future grants on a case-by-case basis.

“The fact they were begrudging these children social services and an education, well there’s nothing Christian about that,” said John Hurley, a self-described liberal professor at Rancho Santiago College who lost his Orange Unified board seat to Jacobson. “In fact, it was anti-Christian.”

Unbowed, the majority reasserted its authority in May by swearing off federal aid and then prohibiting five schools from applying for a program funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and Education. The program, which offered $3,000 to individual campuses, would link up schools with local businesses to expose students to various careers.

“When you start playing ball with the federal government, it’s like playing with a drug dealer--the first one is always free,” explained Trustee Lewis, who ran for the board in 1991 primarily to improve the district’s financial stability.

Still, only a few weeks later and with the financial stakes much higher, the board tempered its position and unanimously allowed officials to seek a $5-million technology grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Board members said they approved the funding because it came with virtually “no federal strings attached.”

Few critics, though, expect the board to back off its agenda.

“They are the poster children for why community-run school boards are obsolete,” said Sheryl Stevens, former executive director of Orange Unified’s Education Assn., which represents about 1,200 teachers. “They are so uninformed about so many things, and then they just make decisions based on emotion or advancing their own political careers.

“We need full-time professionals who will carefully study these issues and what it means to schoolchildren,” Stevens added.

Some in the community who agree with the majority’s views object to its often hard-line approach.

“If they polled the citizens, they would be more in line with the conservative board members,” said Beverly Nestande, a local Republican activist who sits on the boards of some of the city’s most prestigious charities. “But the school board members just have to listen to people, including people who don’t agree with them. They have to find some way to work together and stop polarizing the community. . . . We have conservative views but where schools are concerned, we can’t politicize this.”

The bitter arguments have prompted the PTA and residents to form watchdog groups that attend board meetings.

“I would like to see partisan politics taken out of it,” said Janice White, president of the district’s council of PTAs. “We feel very strongly that every issue should be weighed against how it impacts the children in this district. I think that in some of these discussions, yes, that has been lost.”

For now, the board majority contends its appetite for conservative reform has been largely satisfied by merely challenging the “liberal-dominated” education field. Although the trustees support school prayer and teaching creationism, the board members say they have no plans to push for either of the pet conservative causes.

“People think we have a list of 25 things and we are just on No. 4, and they are scared to think of what No. 25 may be,” said Lewis, a trader on the Pacific Stock Exchange. “But it’s just not true. Things get blown out of proportion since we are a conservative board. We sneeze and it gets in the papers.”

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Driving a School District

Orange Unified School District’s four-member majority has evolved into a solid voting bloc, moving the district’s policies in a more conservative direction. Here’s a look at them and the opposition:

THE MAJORITY

Maureen Aschoff

Age: 51

Occupation: Librarian at University Park branch in Irvine

Elected: 1991; reelected 1995

Issues: Vocal member of ultraconservative majority, determined to pave the way for Republican educational agenda on issues such as privatization of services, back-to-basics academics and local control of schools. Proud to be Enemy No. 1 of the unions and wants to wrest power from them.

Belief: Won office by promoting school vouchers in 1991 and winning respect of conservative Orange County Republicans and politically active religious groups. “I think Orange Unified, or at least the board, will be considered educational leaders of the county, if not the state. . . . You might say I’m an activist for conservative causes.”

****

Martin Jacobson

Age: 43

Occupation: Self-employed accountant

Elected: 1993

Issues: Lead crusader in majority’s mission; active in conservative Christians’ campaign against abortion and government-sponsored social services. Committed to weakening power of unions and wants to sue to recover funds that teachers have accumulated in health-benefits trust.

Belief: There are few nuances within controversial issues: “I feel very strongly about things. It’s fairly easy for me to make decisions. There’s some tough decisions, but pretty much everything is black and white to me.”

****

Bill Lewis

Age: 43

Occupation: Pacific Stock Exchange floor trader

Elected: 1991; reelected 1995

Issues: A swing-vote for years, hardened his attitude toward unions and other activists after brutal reelection campaign. A libertarian, opposes accepting grants or government funding with too many strings. Supports more privatization of services. Only board member with children in the district.

Belief: Raised even conservative eyebrows recently by attacking federal government aid: “When you start playing ball with the federal government, it’s like playing with a drug dealer--the first one is always free. They lure you in and then you’re hooked on federal money. You’re a slave to the government.”

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Max Reissmueller

Age: 27

Occupation: Sales and information systems management for computer company

Elected: 1993

Issues: Biblical fundamentalist who wants religion back in schools. Supports corporal punishment, back-to-basics academics and more parental influence; opposes governmental involvement in schools. Adamantly backs privatization and is a strong foe of social services in schools, frequently comparing such programs to welfare. Home-schools own children and thinks educators should act as “consultants” to parents within schools.

Belief: Denies rumors he belongs to a militia, but sees nothing wrong with them: “Our government was started by a bunch of militia members. . . . I don’t have anything against militias. I don’t have any problems with survival groups. Most of them, as far as I know, are people who believe that in order for them to be protected, they’ll have to do it themselves.”

****

THE MINORITY

James Fearns

Age: 65

Occupation: Retired Orange County probation officer

Elected: 1993

Issues: Retired Marine; only member of minority to consistently blast majority in public. Supports social services in school, frequently reminding board that youths he worked with as a probation officer could have been deterred from crime with more attention earlier in life. Opposes privatizing school services; lead opponent to turning over cafeteria services to private food company.

Belief: Finds himself consistently outvoted and enraged by actions of the majority: “I don’t know what’s going to pop out of the bag next. I think it’s a case of the minority [in the community] dictating to the majority.”

****

Rick Ledesma

Age: 34

Occupation: Cost analyst at Automotive Safety Components Inc.

Elected: 1993

Issues: Worries public schools are not competitive with private ones and wants to improve district image. Supports back-to-basics approaches to reading, math and writing and will consider privatization.

Belief: Infrequently comments during board arguments and attempts to find consensus on issues: “I do feel at times a majority of the board has an in-your-face attitude. I’m of the mind that you propose something, back it and support it. There’s no need to name-call.”

****

Robert H. Viviano

Age: 65

Occupation: Retired former director of Brunswick Corp. defense division.

Elected: 1991; reelected 1995

Issues: Fiscally conservative; former Marine ran for office because of concern about district’s financial and embezzlement scandals of the 1980s. Would like board to focus on bilingual education, which he believes is failing, and developing property owned by the district.

Belief: Headlines about volatile board votes make him wince: “There is a lot of concern that we need to stabilize and settle down. This board has too much notoriety--and it’s notoriety, not anything else.”

Source: Individual board members