Orange Trustees Seek Reform--of Their Image

Even before they take their seats, the new school board of the Orange Unified School District has begun preparing for the job--by taking a crash course in public relations.

Three new trustees and one incumbent who won their seats with a conservative sweep of the controversial board are working to clarify their positions to the public and assure the people of a new era of calm.

“We want to let people know we’re not as bad as we’ve been portrayed,” said board President Martin Jacobson, who retained his seat by a narrow margin. “We’ve been portrayed as a group that hates public education, that hates teachers, that doesn’t care about kids and just wants to dismantle the whole system. That’s just not true.”

The district has made headlines both locally and around the nation and was the largest district in the state to dismantle bilingual education. Conservative trustees have fought to take what they consider “social welfare” out of the schools, have rejected federal school-to-work funds as being tainted by big government and have lobbied for more charter schools so they can evade the state’s Education Code.

But with a 6-1 majority on the new board, they say, the days of confrontation should be over.

New trustee Linda Davis, a 48-year-old Villa Park community volunteer, has been visiting schools, assuring teachers and administrators that the new board is not out to get them.

And Jacobson, who has battled to rid the schools of what he calls distracting social services, has been explaining to everyone who asks that conservative does not mean Neanderthal.

It was just a month ago that the four conservative candidates--Jacobson, Davis, Kathy Ward and Terri Sargeant--were clinking champagne glasses in Davis’ living room as the election results came in: all four were elected and just one moderate, Robert H. Viviano, was left on the board. Voter approval of a referendum dismantling bilingual education in the district also buoyed their spirits.

Together with sitting trustees Bill Lewis and Maureen Aschoff, they will govern a 29,000-student district that sprawls over all of Orange and Villa Park and parts of Anaheim, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

The dynamics of the new board should contrast sharply with the old, which regularly split 4 to 3 on contentious issues such as allowing psychological counseling in the schools.

The trustees hope that unity will inspire calm.

“Four years ago, we were hassling with labor problems and legal problems. And now a lot of that is behind us and we can do what a school board is supposed to do,” Jacobson said. “I’d like to see more of an emphasis on academics. I want to look at the curriculum and find ways to improve the academic standards for our students.”

The new board, he added, is not going to automatically reject grants for schools just because they are funded by state or federal money--if they come in with relatively few conditions attached. He does not object to receiving money, but he does reject the idea of a higher level of government dictating exactly how to spend it.

To prove his point, he went back to the beginning of the district’s grant controversy: the Lampson Elementary School debate.

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It was early last year when the board was asked to approve a grant that the school and an organization of parents and community members had won to offer some medical and other aid to low-income students. Conservative board members decided to take a stand on the issue, stating that schools are for academics and that parents should deal with everything else.

Hundreds of residents confronted the board, arguing that kids who are hungry or in pain cannot learn. Schools, they argued, must step in when parents are not up to it.

It ended with a compromise that every grant request from that point on would be scrutinized by the board for its educational and social implications.

Jacobson explained that instead of simply giving the school $25,000 to help poor children, the foundation awarding the grant specified exactly what would be involved--a mobile health clinic, for one.

New trustee Ward is aware that she caused some alarm among Orange Unified watchers at the old school board’s final meeting earlier this month.

When it came time for the trustees to vote on whether to approve a $525,000 federal grant proposal to offer more training to teachers, Ward stepped up to the microphone from her seat in the audience. Without background material specifying what strings would be attached to the grant money, it would be irresponsible to approve it, she said.

It wasn’t approved. Instead, the board agreed to hold a special meeting tonight to discuss the issue. It will be the first time the new board meets, three days before the official swearing-in ceremony Thursday, and Ward said she was not intending to stir yet more controversy.

“I’m hoping the message to parents and the district is that we just want to be informed,” said Ward, who added that she probably will vote to approve the grant request now that she’s seen the paperwork. “I want us to be held accountable for what we’re doing.”

If that’s conservative, said some of the new trustees, then what’s wrong with that?

“I am getting a definition from the educational community about what a conservative is, and I don’t think it’s an adverse label,” said new board member Sargeant, 44, who works as a planner for the county. “It’s back to basics. They’re experimenting on our kids in California. . . . I’m probably a little more moderate: Show me what’s good for the kids. We have to be driven by common sense.”

Ward, 40, said she became interested in district politics after feeling that she had been shoved aside when her son developed learning disabilities.

Campaigning on a “family values” platform, she said that a lot of problems in the classroom that social scientists want to cure with counseling are caused by inadequate education of children in the early years.

“One of the things I saw was a typical arc for a child who was not learning,” she said. “By the time they get into junior high school, they are self-medicating themselves with drugs. If there is no educational intervention, then by the time they get to high school they are in real trouble. I’m trying to make sure no kids slip through the cracks.”

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The trustees will have to cope with the fallout from a yearlong battle with the teachers union over salaries.

Nearly all the new trustees said they still were bitter about a brutal election campaign in which the teachers union vocally campaigned for the four candidates who lost. Now, the new board and the union must begin this year’s salary negotiations.

But Suzanne Vaugine, president of the Orange Unified Education Assn., said everyone will have to get past that.

“We had a difficult bargaining session that lasted an entire school year, and the teachers have a right to feel nervous about that,” she said. “But campaign time is campaign time. They want to win and we want to win. What I’m hoping is we can be congenial enough to be able to negotiate. There are issues we will be disagreeing about, but we need to keep talking. . . . I am cautiously optimistic.”