School Board Elects Julie Korenstein to President’s Post

A chronically divided Los Angeles Board of Education failed to offer President Jeff Horton a routine second term in office Monday, electing instead San Fernando Valley board member Julie Korenstein to the top post for the first time in her decade on the board.

Community and board members said they hoped the move would calm the bickering that has come to dominate many board meetings, leading to tenuous 4-3-vote approvals on many issues and a failure to support the new superintendent’s initial attempt to appoint his own cabinet.

Historically, school board presidents who want a second one-year term are usually reelected.

Horton anticipated the vote and took himself out of the running. “The main job of the president is to bring people together, and when you can’t do that, you feel you’ve failed,” he said.

One school board meeting regular, parent Dafer Dakhil, said that under Horton’s reign the board has become “a model of how a dysfunctional system works” and accused board members of resembling participants on the Jerry Springer television show.

Korenstein has often been on the losing end of those split votes and has also frequently been the target of the acerbic criticism from Horton that insiders said caused support for him to wane.

During her swearing-in as a board member Monday on the district’s patio, Korenstein said the panel must dedicate itself to improving student literacy, adding that she truly hoped “we can all roll up our sleeves and make it work.”

Also sworn in were newcomer Valerie Fields and Victoria Castro, who is beginning her second term. Castro made a bid for the presidency as well but gained only three votes, including her own.

The departure of member Mark Slavkin leaves a school board with only one public-school parent--Horton, who last year adopted a son with his partner. Several members, including Korenstein, have grandchildren attending district schools.

While board infighting can hardly be blamed exclusively on Horton, since some of it emerges from long-held animosities, his critics and supporters alike said he did little to smooth out disagreements.

A board president must at times suppress his own interests in favor of mediation, said Slavkin, who preceded Horton in the presidency. That role, he said, did not come naturally to Horton.

“Jeff is really bright, really thoughtful, and I agreed with him more often than not,” Slavkin said. “But his temperament is such that” he had trouble handling the board.

Teachers’ union President Day Higuchi criticized Horton for sacrificing board consensus in his desire to further his “social agenda,” which he said included his advocacy for health benefits for domestic partners--a proposal backed by the union.

Higuchi said that after initially having doubts about Korenstein, he has high hopes that she will be able to better manage the board.

“Her instincts are right,” Higuchi said. “She may be far more capable of bringing the board together than people think.”

Horton said he would have liked to serve a second one-year term, but as the date approached for the annual election, he found he did not have majority support. He said he hoped that stepping aside would allow him to lobby harder for several of his major interests, namely expanding school reform and providing adequate library and textbooks for schoolchildren.

In May, Horton joined Slavkin in a vote against the appointment of the new superintendent, district veteran Ruben Zacarias, and last week Horton joined the board majority in opposing Zacarias’ proposal for promoting three deputies from the assistant-superintendent ranks.

However, Zacarias said Monday that he will insist on board approval of his appointments next week. The three are Lillian Castillo, who heads the district’s parent-education branch, chief Sacramento lobbyist Ron Prescott and Francis Nakano, a member of former Supt. Sid Thompson’s cabinet.

Some board members have privately questioned whether the three choices represented a back-room deal between Zacarias and individual board members, in which he was promised their votes in return for their agreeing to the multiethnic trio. Castillo is Latina, Prescott is black and Nakano is Asian.

Zacarias denied he was acting at anyone’s behest. He said that the board’s failure to approve the three was “not . . . unexpected, given the fragmented behavior of this board lately,” he said. “But I’m very optimistic. I think board members are becoming more and more aware of the public’s strong desire that they show unity.”