Simi Hires Retired Superintendent for Interim

Eager to fill a leadership void at the top, school trustees Thursday tapped a retired superintendent from the Las Virgenes school district to guide local schools through the summer.

Albert “Bud” Marley will take charge of the 18,400-student Simi Valley Unified School District while trustees hunt for a permanent replacement for Supt. Tate Parker, who announced his resignation last week after a falling-out with the school board.

Trustees picked Marley based on his long experience and strong reputation. He once served as superintendent of Ojai schools and, more recently, filled in as interim superintendent of Salinas’ high school district.

“Our administrators know Dr. Marley,” Simi school board President Norm Walker said Thursday. “They’re familiar with him, and they’re really excited for him to come in.”

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Marley, who was recommended by the California School Boards Assn. and local school administrators, will start July 1 and receive $519 daily for his work.

He said Thursday that although he had no interest in becoming Parker’s permanent replacement, he would pour all his efforts into the new job.

“The only way I will go into any role is at the 110% level,” Marley said. “Everything I do will be done as if I intended to be there forever.”

Marley’s 11 years at the helm of Las Virgenes Unified School District were marked by both successes and snafus. He brought labor peace to a district that had been hit by a teachers strike. But he also offended Asian Americans and gays with some controversial comments.

During a 1990 Optimist Club meeting in Calabasas, Marley touched off a furor by using a racially charged description of Asian facial features while showing slides of a trip to China. Attorney Lyn Philipps, a Japanese American, left the meeting appalled and wrote a letter to Marley complaining about his choice of terms.

Marley’s written response, Phillips said, implied that she was being overly sensitive. “I really never got a real apology from him,” she said Thursday.

The ethnic slur, she said, “was not a slip of the tongue, and it certainly wasn’t ignorance.”

Two years later, Marley was quoted as telling a meeting of the American Assn. of University Women’s Thousand Oaks branch that too many of the men teaching elementary school were “effeminate.” He later said he meant to say that more men were needed in elementary education.

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Marley declined to discuss those past comments Thursday.

Walker said the Simi trustees decided that Marley’s decades of experience outweighed those few questionable remarks.

“If in some 30-odd years you’ve got just two foot-in-mouth comments--you make allowances,” he said.

Indeed, past and present Las Virgenes district officials praised Marley on Thursday as a talented administrator and a caring man, who lacked the prejudices others had attributed to him.

“We’re all guilty sometimes of speaking before we think through what we’re saying, and although I wasn’t happy with the comments he made, I don’t think they were made with malicious intent,” said Sandra Pope, a fourth-grade teacher and president of the local teachers union.

When Marley was hired in 1984, the district was still suffering through the aftermath of a bitter teachers strike that Pope had led. The school board gave Marley the task of closing the rift between teachers and administrators.

“Bud Marley was brought in to heal the wounds,” Pope said. “And he was perfect.”

Under Marley’s guidance, the district started negotiating labor contracts every three years instead of annually and emphasized an open, cooperative negotiating style.

“It really let everyone cool off,” said Dick Koppel, then a district trustee.

Current Las Virgenes Trustee Barbara Bowman Fagelson said Marley also worked closely with the board.

“Bud was very accessible,” she said. “He was out in the community, he was at school functions; everyone could get ahold of him.”

Marley retired from Las Virgenes in 1995.

He now takes the reigns of a school district that has lost several top administrators within the past month.

Simi Valley trustees placed Parker on paid administrative leave June 4, just five months after he joined the district. His resignation, announced last week, will be effective Aug. 31 and will be followed by a $81,000 payment from the district to end his contract.

Assistant Supt. Susan Parks stepped in as the interim superintendent after Parker was placed on leave. But before the move, she had already committed to a job heading the Baldwin Park school district and left the Simi district last week.