Louise Seyler; Pioneering L.A. School Official

Louise Wood Seyler, a groundbreaking female educator and administrator in the Los Angeles city schools, has died at the age of 91.

Seyler, a former Times Woman of the Year, died Nov. 14 near El Toro in Orange County.

She capped her four-decade career in the Los Angeles Unified School District by serving from 1956 until her retirement in 1967 as deputy superintendent, at that time the highest-ranking woman in the system. Often serving as acting superintendent, Seyler was outranked among top women in district history only by Susan B. Dorsey, a superintendent in the 1920s.

Two presidents--Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson--and Ronald Reagan as governor tried to lure Seyler to Washington and Sacramento for prestigious posts heading federal or state education departments. But she stayed in Los Angeles, saying that the local schools needed her most.

Seyler was the first woman to earn a doctorate in education from UCLA.

Widowed in 1961 by the death of her first husband, electronics engineer Henry G. Seyler, the educator married her counterpart, George H. Geyer, then associate superintendent of the San Diego city schools, in 1966. The following year, she succeeded her new husband as president of the California Assn. of School Administrators, only the second woman elected to the position in the organization’s history.

Seyler was named Times Woman of the Year in 1957 and Associated Press’ educator of the year, the first woman to achieve that distinction, in 1956.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Seyler once told The Times with a laugh that her childhood playmates had complained repeatedly, “Aw, Louise, do we have to play school again?”

Educated at the University of Denver, Occidental College, UC Berkeley and UCLA, Seyler became a teacher in 1928, assigned to problem boys at Allesandro Elementary School. Discipline, she always advised, could be best achieved by respecting the child and winning the troublemakers to your side. She succeeded.

Two years later she was promoted to teach English and mathematics at Lincoln High School. She later served as a counselor at Polytechnic High School and, encouraged to try administration, became an elementary school principal. She worked in central district administration as head of teacher assignments and then head of the elementary division.

Throughout her school district career, Seyler championed special curricula for what she called “atypical children”--both slow and gifted.

“I look forward to the day,” she said in 1956, “when it is taken for granted that every educable student will go to school two years beyond high school.”

Seyler is survived by her third husband, Vaughan Kelly.