Mayor’s Bid to Cool Schools Stirs Up Heat

What’s bothering Canoga Park High School Principal Larry G. Higgins is the promise he made to all those parents and kids.

A substantial number of his San Fernando Valley classrooms are unbearably hot on many days, and he told parents that air conditioning would be installed if last spring’s bond issue passed.

Mayor Richard Riordan made the same promise and, since he’s a big favorite in the Valley, his pledge helped the bond issue to its upset victory.

Now, while Higgins and other principals and teachers--and kids--wait for action, Riordan is trying to kick-start the notoriously ponderous Los Angeles Unified School District onto a fast air-conditioning track. But in doing so, he has provoked a heavy counterattack from a school bureaucracy accustomed to doing things in its own slow way.

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I saw a resemblance between the no-excuse mayor and Principal Higgins when I visited the school.

I walked into Higgins’ office at 11 a.m. Tuesday, just when I said would be there. Unfortunately, I realized that I had left my business cards in my car and I wanted to give Higgins one. I ran to the car, got my cards, dashed back to the office and saw a tall, athletic, commanding-looking man who had to be the principal.

I introduced myself. He looked at the clock. “I had an appointment to meet a reporter at 11 a.m.,” he said. “It is now 11:04.”

I began explaining, but, under the principal’s stern gaze, I realized that I sounded like I did when I used to tell Doc Haller at San Leandro High School that I had left my chemistry homework on the bus.

Higgins walked briskly into his classroom, showed me a seat and told me about his classrooms without air conditioning.

“The problem is, there is nothing you can do when you are uncomfortable,” he said. Making the situation worse, he said, is “you have kids with disabilities, kids who are not doing well. Some days, it’s 90 degrees in the classroom.”

Higgins didn’t exactly campaign for Proposition BB, the school bonds issue. “But when parents said, ‘What are you going to do about the heat?’ I’d say we have this bond issue coming up,” he said.

During the campaign for Proposition BB, Mayor Riordan said much the same thing, only in stronger terms, in speeches and mailers that were crucial in gaining votes for the bond measure in the tax-resistant west San Fernando Valley. In exchange for his support, Riordan got the school district to accept an outside oversight committee to oversee spending of Proposition BB funds. After the election, a Riordan senior advisor, businessman Steve Soboroff, became the committee chairman.

With Riordan’s and Soboroff’s backing, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Pacific Enterprises, owner of the Gas Co., and Enova Corp., another energy company, offered to air-condition 300 schools by September 1998. That’s far less time than required by the district’s usual process of soliciting designs and bids for individual jobs. In return, the district would sign a long-term contract to buy power from the consortium.

It sounded like the beginning of a great idea. The proposal needed work, of course, and some tough negotiating with the utility giants. But who can argue with fast-tracking the air conditioning?

Guess who? The school district bureaucracy, in a memo to the school board by Roger Rasmussen, head of the district’s independent analysis unit.

He didn’t like the financial terms. And, he said he was concerned about the involvement of mayoral aide Soboroff.

Soboroff, Rasmussen told me, is “looking out for the interests of the city, which includes the DWP,’ while heading the bond issue oversight committee. It is, Rasmussen said, “difficult to serve two masters.”

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I’m sure asking questions like these is part of Rasmussen’s job, but the fact is that school bureaucrats don’t want Riordan sticking his nose in district affairs. And they don’t like the idea of the mayor’s man, Soboroff, heading the bond issue oversight committee. They want the schoolyard kept firmly in the hands of educational bureaucrats, like themselves.

But they had better get used to the Riordan presence.

When the mayor was sworn in for his second term, he vowed to make education his No. 1 priority. The air-conditioning issue marks the first mayoral attempt to influence district operations.

He has no patience with bureaucracy or excuses.

In that, he’s got a lot in common with Larry Higgins, the principal who doesn’t like excuses either.