Compton Schools Seek End to State Control

A handful of Compton school trustees who were stripped of their power and perquisites when state officials took over the debt-ridden school district in 1993 went to court Monday in a bid to oust the state’s administrators and retake the reins.

Lawyers for the trustees charged that the district was unconstitutionally seized. They contended that the district has now met state benchmarks for progress, and demanded that the 28,000-student school system be returned to local authority. Since its 1993 collapse, the district has been run by a state appointee with czar-like powers over its financial and academic affairs.

“The crisis has been stabilized,” an attorney for the board trustees, L’Tanya Butler, said in opening statements before Superior Court Judge David A. Workman in downtown Los Angeles. “It is time for the state’s interests to yield.”

That has left the state Department of Education in the awkward position of having to argue that in 3 1/2 years it has failed to fully repair the district’s financial system and that it needs more time to finish the job.

“I think [the state has] done well under the circumstances,” said Paula Gibson, a deputy attorney general representing the state. “This has not been an easy job to do.”

Compton Unified had been struggling to meet its payroll and boost test scores for years before it was forced to seek $20 million in emergency loans from the state. As a condition of the initial loan, the district was placed in receivership and the seven-member school board, which governed the district, was reduced to an advisory panel while the state’s own appointees ran day-to-day operations.

Many parents view the question of who is best-suited to run the district as a choice between the lesser of two evils. On one side is the state Department of Education, which has by its own admission neglected the district’s long-decaying schools and failed to stop the exodus of hundreds of veteran teachers, although it has paid off enough of the loan to cut the balance to about $16 million. On the other is an elected school board that has offered few suggestions on how to improve the district’s academic program, choosing instead to debate personnel decisions and lead frequent pickets.

The trustees will argue that because the state’s administrators have essentially done a thorough enough job of cleaning up the district’s financial mess and operations, the education department is required to relinquish control to local authorities and install a special trustee with limited power to guide district finances. But in public and at recent school board meetings, the trustees have contended that the state’s management of the district has failed--leaving students without books, supplies and even toilet paper, and allowing the district’s campuses to slip further into disrepair.

In court Monday, attorney Butler noted that the makeup of the school board has changed significantly since mid-1993, with only one trustee left from the district’s pre-takeover days.

“This is the board that wants to be part of the solution,” Butler said.

But attorneys for the state and the Department of Education pounced on the first witness, Board President Saul E. Lankster, saying that the panel lacked the expertise to manage a district with $129 million in annual expenditures.

Lankster testified that he and fellow board members had developed their own written plan to improve the district’s academic program, but Gibson attacked it as a “cut and paste” of plans from other school districts with goals that didn’t match Compton’s needs.

For example, the board-authored plan called for bilingual education for students who spoke Farsi, Russian and other languages, but Lankster said he didn’t know whether any such students attended Compton schools.

But if the board’s plan lacks focus, one of the state’s central exhibits--its own recently released progress report--has raised questions about whether the state can improve its performance.

Despite marginal improvement in reading and math test scores, the report states, Compton students “are still ranked at the lowest levels statewide.”

The report notes that the state also has failed to follow through on its efforts to retool the district’s internal operations. Although experts from the Los Angeles County Office of Education and others developed new accounting procedures, they were still not being followed as of December 1996. Audits of the district since the state takeover have repeatedly found a lack of adequate controls over district accounts--findings that “represent the lack of sufficient numbers of skilled employees to attack the large backlog of work . . . and the overall lack of accountability for most district employees.”