3 for Community College Board

The seven-member Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees has a low profile but considerable clout, overseeing the largest district in a state system that educates more than 22% of all U.S. college students. The importance is underscored by the acknowledgment of President Clinton and Gov. Pete Wilson that, for many, a community college education can be a key path from welfare to work.

Three board seats are being contested in the April 8 city elections.

Last year the board’s image was suddenly and negatively impacted when the trustees tried, and failed, to impose an annual tax of about $12 on nearly every household in the district. The board may be forgiven for trying to generate the fees Sacramento seems unwilling to provide: The colleges get only about one-fourth the student dollars allocated to the UC system. But the board’s insular attitude, exemplified by its failure to explain fully to the public how it would use the $12 tax, rightly generated a public outcry.

Office No. 2: Elizabeth Garfield, elected to the board in 1993, has helped expand the community colleges’ outreach into useful efforts like parent training, and her criticisms of the system have been consistently balanced and fair. Commendably, she accepts a share of the responsibility for the board’s decision to try to impose a property tax, even though she herself opposed it in favor of a bond measure. She praises most of the faculty while acknowledging that “there is some deadwood.”

Office No. 4: Candidate Marilyn Grunwald, a businesswoman and education activist, has impressive drive and knowledge about the challenges facing the colleges. But Kelly Candaele, a veteran community college teacher, is better positioned to operate effectively within the current system, and his previous leadership in city job-preparation programs like Workforce Los Angeles has given him the skills crucial to dealing with the social responsibilities that politicians expect the colleges to take on.

Office No. 6: A 20-year veteran of the system, Althea Baker may lack a dramatic vision of the colleges’ future but her goals are realizable largely because they are sensible. Rather than simply ticking off pie-in-the-sky targets like requiring all community college students to master trigonometry, Baker says “the key is to get students to set their own high standards, and then to see that they realize them.”

The Times endorses Garfield, Candaele and Baker.