Troubled Schools’ Fighting Spirit

When someone set fire to Brenda Johnson’s Volkswagen Beetle, she took it as a sign she was doing something right.

Johnson assumed that the 1996 arson was just one more price to pay for her crusade to improve the beleaguered schools of Bassett, a poor, unincorporated community about 20 miles east of Los Angeles.

After all, during her seven years on the Bassett Unified School Board, Johnson survived recall drives and fought off an effort to get a court order forbidding her from talking about closed meetings. She was vilified in a community newsletter and had her tires slashed.

“I fight for the children of Bassett the way I fight for my own,” Johnson said. “Maybe to others it looks like the devil incarnated. But I am just a mother fighting for my young.”

In November, voters embraced Johnson’s vision and elected two of her allies to the five-member board. After years of toiling as a dissident, Johnson now is school board president, responsible for turning around a system in which only one in five seniors took the SAT last year, and half the 5,800 students have limited English skills.

A tough, unyielding advocate, Johnson has her share of detractors along with her many admirers. But, befitting a woman whose paying job is to drive a dozen 100-ton locomotives through Los Angeles rail yards, she remains an irresistible force.

“She is awesome. That lady has guts,” said Irma Rodriguez, mother of three students. “If I was her, I would have given up and moved somewhere else.”

The Compton native, who gives her age as “old as dirt,” likes to don T-shirts with quotations by Plato as she tours the district’s rundown schools. She dresses smartly for district meetings, then changes into blue jeans, steel-toe-capped boots, sweatshirt and leather gloves before heading to the Union Pacific Los Angeles rail yards, where she works as a “hostler,” moving locomotives across the yard.

Amid the acrid smell of diesel, Johnson maneuvers hulks of steel into lines of engines that will power quarter-mile-long trains. Arranging the pieces like a giant jigsaw puzzle requires skill and precision as well as plenty of muscle.

Johnson doesn’t just drive these diesel giants. She guides them like the ground crew at an airport, throws three-foot switches and operates the roundhouse--a giant turntable used to move an engine from one line to another.

“These are my toys and this is my fun,” the mother of two grown children said over the din of pounding motors. She is tireless. Till the crack of dawn, she climbs up and down ladders on locomotives, with the occasional rest in the “shanty,” a shack with an old black-and-white television.

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Johnson is one of the few women in the dangerous job. “You need to be flexible” to get along with people at the yard, she said. Few of her co-workers know of her daytime passion.

She returns home at 6 a.m. The local kids call her “Grandma,” and in the afternoons, Vietnamese immigrant children from the neighborhood visit Johnson’s three-bedroom house for help with their homework. She also makes weekly visits to classrooms and sponsors a chess tournament at a continuation high school.

The school district she leads is the lone public institution in this two-and-a-half square miles of sunburnt blacktop and tiny bungalows, a remote San Gabriel Valley neighborhood without a supermarket, a postal address or a library.

“Most people never even know they are here,” said board member Andrea Elias. “Bassett is very fortunate to have Brenda.”

Johnson and her new board allies say they want the district to return to the basics after years in which they say it paid more attention to educational fads than teaching. Their motto is “Students First.”

They have replaced two of the nine school principals, audited the district’s finances, added extra counselors and formed committees to chart new directions for the schools in areas such as technology.

But Johnson and her reformers are hampered by the legacy of her former school board foes, who went on a spending spree as the election loomed last year and left the district $11 million in debt.

After they were unseated in the November elections, the lame-duck board members, joined by another board member, voted to give themselves--as private citizens--control of the district’s finances. They contended that the new board couldn’t be trusted with the money. Johnson’s administration had to hire attorneys to regain authority over its own budget.

“They essentially hijacked the district’s money,” acting Supt. Don Samuels said.

That “hijacking” was the culmination of four years of acrimony. During that time, Johnson was the target of three recall campaigns backed by the bloc that controlled the board. Johnson, in turn, made repeated allegations of conflict of interest against the former superintendent, Linda Gonzales, who enjoyed the support of the board majority.

In the last campaign against Johnson, the recall petitions were stolen out of a storefront campaign office the night before they were to be sent to the county registrar. It is an indication of Bassett’s byzantine power plays that Johnson says she thinks her enemies engineered the theft to frame her.

“If they had guns they’d have shot each other,” said Hal Mintz, who led a failed school bond measure effort last year.

“It has gotten to be like . . . the Hatfields and McCoys,” Johnson said of the political feud. “Now we all need to work together for the kids’ sake.”

Johnson’s foes are vitriolic in their contempt, using words such as “liar” and “money grabber” to describe her.

“She has an agenda. It is to destroy,” former board member Toni Giaffoglione said.

Giaffoglione has reason to be angry at Johnson. Because of complaints from Johnson and her supporters, Giaffoglione was fined $8,100 by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission this month for failing to file campaign reports and misreporting donations and expenditures.

Johnson’s other two foes from the school board have also been fined by the FPPC this year, and the district faces fines as well for distributing a newsletter promoting Giaffoglione and her two board allies.

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For a small district in an obscure corner of the county, Bassett has garnered quite a reputation. “I know where Bassett is,” joked one FPPC official. “I think everyone has heard of the place here.”

Officials say investigations into Bassett by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and state officials include a probe of why Gonzales kept a district laptop computer for her personal use after she left her post last year; why district money was used to pay for a firm to “coordinate” Gonzales’ legal defense against Johnson’s allegations; and why district vendors were asked to help with a school bond campaign.

Gonzales has denied wrongdoing and provided documentation to sheriff’s deputies that shows the board allowed her to keep the computer. The district attorney’s office looked into the conflict of interest allegations and declined to file charges. Gonzalez declined to be interviewed for this story.

Under this cloud of investigation, the district labors to improve a sagging record. One of five students who enter Bassett’s lone high school never graduate. Thirty percent of Bassett’s teachers are uncredentialed--nearly double the rate of Los Angeles Unified’s uncredentialed instructors. The SAT scores are among the lowest in the county.

Johnson acknowledges the district’s dismal performance with the same unflustered, no-nonsense talk she uses to guide the sometimes unruly and seemingly endless board meetings. In that same tone, she admitted making an error last month when she excluded a board member and political foe from a closed session.

In an overwhelmingly Latino district, some of Johnson’s political opponents have tried to argue that she is not a good representative of the schoolchildren because she is African American. But Johnson says race is not an issue for her.

“This is America and I believe we are a melting pot,” Johnson said. “I have grandchildren who are of Asian blood and who are Samoan and white. I don’t have time for racial division. I love children.”