Councilman Who Became Teacher Goes Back to Law Firm

Bill Crowfoot, the Pasadena lawyer and city councilman who made headlines in 1995 with his decision to leave his practice for a high school teaching job, has gone back to being an attorney at the downtown law firm where he had worked before.

Crowfoot, who had spent a year and a half at Blair High School before quitting two weeks ago, said that he loved working with the students, but became worn down by the low pay and low status accorded to educators in the public schools.

“Teachers are educated and expected to be part of an elite class of decision makers,” he said, “and yet we’re paid and treated like second-class citizens. And that dichotomy, after a while, got to me.”

That feeling, he said, had led him by the end of the summer to conclude that he would probably return to practicing law after this school year. When he took the teaching job, he had said publicly that his unofficial goal was to stay at Blair for two years before reassessing his career, and by late summer, he said, he was beginning to worry about the way his savings were dwindling on a teacher’s salary.

But last month, he said, he got an unexpected call from his former employers at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, a large law firm downtown, where he was offered a post in the investment management group. The only catch was, he would have to start immediately.

Despite a sense of “acute withdrawal from the kids,” he decided to take the job, and left his teaching post about two weeks ago during the semester break. Crowfoot expressed deep appreciation of the dedication of the faculty at Blair High, and added that because of his involvement with the students, “I have a great appreciation of the teen-bashing that goes on in our society.”

Frankly, he made it longer than I thought he would, and did better than I thought he would,” said Blair Principal John Herrera. Herrera credited Crowfoot, who is bilingual and taught several classes for students who spoke limited English, with providing a role model for immigrant students in the school.

“It’s a loss to the kids, who saw Bill and thought, ‘I could be an abogado too,’ ” Herrera said. “And it’s a loss to the school, because he was an advocate for us. Because he was a city councilman, the school board would listen to him, and he was able to do a lot for the school.”

“We were sorry to see him leave,” said Rich Miyagawa, chairman of the English Language Development Department, in which Crowfoot taught. “What other department in California can say they have had a lawyer on the faculty, who also speaks Spanish and who is a city councilman?”