School Bond Brings Rare Harmony From Riordan, Hayden

Both major Los Angeles mayoral candidates came out swinging Monday on a controversial issue sure to foster heated debate in the burgeoning campaign: education.

Mayor Richard Riordan and his challenger, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), came out boldly in support of it. Better public education and more of it, but with less waste of taxpayer money, to be specific.

How to achieve that lofty goal, however, was left pretty much unsaid during the candidates’ pronouncements on the matter--except that they both favor spending more money.

On a day when most Angelenos were taking advantage of a day off, Riordan and Hayden joined other elected officials in urging voters to support a $2.4-billion bond measure that would pay for repairs to classrooms in the Los Angeles area.

Known as Proposition BB, the bond measure garnered just under the 66.6% voter approval needed for passage in the Nov. 5 election. To show their support for the measure, which comes up for another vote April 8, Riordan, Hayden and county supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Zev Yaroslavsky attended a news conference at John Marshall High School that was called by the ballot measure’s sponsor, Angelenos for Better Classrooms. The group is chaired by former Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Panorama City), who also attended.

Students at the school, who have won two national titles in the academic decathlon, showed the entourage around, pointing to places in the deteriorating 66-year-old structure where trash cans catch rainwater leaking through the ceiling. The school, like some others within the vast L.A. Unified School District, also suffers from exposed electrical wiring, battered walls and cracked paint.

Both Riordan and Hayden said such problems need fixing.

“When we tell children to reach to their dreams, [that] the sky is the limit, I don’t think anybody thought that we’d be looking at the ceiling to the sky,” Riordan said. The mayor said he now supports the bond measure, even though he did not take a public position on it the last time.

Riordan, through an aide, said the November measure lacked the specific oversight needed to make sure all the bond money was spent properly. Campaign spokesman Todd Harris said the mayor has been guaranteed that there will now be a strong oversight committee, to show “that every dollar will be well spent. He feels that this time all the dollars are accountable.”

Under the proposal, Harris said, specific repairs would be written into “contracts” for each school.

Later in the day, Hayden traveled to Los Angeles Unified headquarters to unveil his “education platform” as part of his campaign for mayor.

Hayden, who served on the state Senate Education Committee, agreed that Proposition BB money is urgently needed--not only to rehabilitate aging facilities but also to modernize them.

The schools, Hayden said, need to incorporate more computers and multimedia technology into their curriculum to bridge the gap between the “haves and the have-nots”--affluent students who have learned valuable computer skills at home and those whose parents cannot afford computers. “This gap is extremely perilous, and it is growing,” Hayden said. “We need our schools to become onramps to the Information Highway, to the 21st century.”

*

To that end, Hayden also has co-sponsored a bill to put another proposition on the ballot that would provide $200 million to build “creative multimedia laboratories” in public schools.

Hayden also said there needs to be far more cooperation among city and school board officials to make better use of classrooms and teachers. Officially, the mayor of Los Angeles has no authority over the affairs of the school district, including such issues as breaking L.A. Unified into smaller and, Hayden contends, more easily manageable districts.

“The separation should end,” Hayden said. “The city has a vital interest in the education of its students.”

Hayden suggested having the mayor or an appointee “perhaps be an ex-officio member” of the school board to foster a better working relationship, and to have the two entities establish a joint task force to look into ways of working together better.

Riordan campaign officials were less than impressed with Hayden’s three-page education platform, saying it lacked specifics and mimicked proposals long favored by Riordan himself.

“Mayor Riordan has dedicated his entire life to turning Los Angeles schools around,” said spokesman Harris. “So insofar as Tom Hayden is joining him in that fight, we welcome him to the cause.”

But, Harris added: “There is very little in this proposal that the mayor has not already accomplished himself. The mayor’s record is not one of rhetoric, but one of accomplishment.”

For instance, Harris said, the mayor has initiated a private campaign through his charitable foundation to put computers and other new technology in more than 300 public and private schools in Los Angeles.

Riordan also co-founded LEARN, an educational reform program that works to empower local schools to make their own decisions and chart their own course. Hayden said Monday that LEARN is an example of the kind of creative approach to education that is sorely needed in Los Angeles, along with more charter schools and magnet schools.