Schools Chief, State Sen. Leslie Announce Bids

The election season continued its rolling start Wednesday as state schools Supt. Delaine Eastin announced her reelection bid and state Sen. Tim Leslie said he has beaten bone cancer and is running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.

Leslie (R-Carnelian Bay) said that he felt good and believed he was cured of multiple myeloma, a cancer that affects bone and bone marrow.

Leslie, 55, released a letter from his doctor saying that he had completed five months of treatment, including high-dose chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant procedure. The doctor said Leslie’s response “has been excellent and his cancer is currently in remission.”

A member of the Legislature since 1986, Leslie will face state Sen. Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia) and businesswoman Noel Irwin Hentschel in the June 2 Republican primary. Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) and former Chief Deputy Secretary of State Tony Miller are seeking the Democratic nomination.

Eastin kicked off her reelection campaign in a replica of a one-room schoolhouse of the 1800s to illustrate the changes she hopes will come to California schools.

“Schools today don’t look like this classroom,” she said of the tiny museum classroom in the restored Old Sacramento district near the state Capitol, “but they look too much like the schools of 50 years ago, and we’ve got to change that.”

Eastin listed class size reductions in early grades among the major achievements of her first term, but went out of her way to share the credit for that popular proposal with Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature.

She said 84% of children in kindergarten through third grade are in classes of 20 or fewer children, compared with 51% last year and virtually none the year before.

“The results of class size reduction are already clear. Reliable testing data from urban districts such as San Francisco and Long Beach and suburban districts like Carlsbad showed dramatic improvement in first-grade reading scores. In other parts of California, teachers report they are as far along in February as they usually are in May,” Eastin said.

But, she said, class size reductions, increasing enrollments and deteriorating older buildings all add to the pressure to modernize California schools.

She said her top goal in a second term is setting higher standards for high school graduation.

Eastin, 51, is a former community college professor and city councilwoman in Union City. She was elected to the state Assembly as a Democrat in 1986, serving four terms before winning election to the nonpartisan office of state superintendent in 1994.

She faces five challengers, the best known being Gloria Tuchman of Tustin, one of the principal backers of the “English for the Children” initiative on the June ballot that would curtail many current bilingual education programs.