Schools Candidates Trade Barbs at Last Forum

Setting the stage for the most expensive Los Angeles Board of Education election ever, eight candidates squared off Wednesday night at UCLA in a contentious debate over student achievement and campaign contributions--their last forum before Tuesday’s election.

The three-hour forum at the Freud Playhouse was attended by about 150 people and produced sharp exchanges, underlining differences on such issues as Mayor Richard Riordan’s support of four candidates, particularly between 5th District incumbent David Tokofsky and his opponent, Los Angeles County Board of Education member Yolie Flores Aguilar.

“I’m a bit worried that for four years we’ve had a candidate owned by the [teachers] union; now, we have a candidate owned by the mayor,” Aguilar said. “They bought themselves a puppet. Who will Mr. Tokofsky represent? I doubt it will be the students.”

“Let’s not forget,” Tokofsky responded, “that Yolie worked for the mayor. He had a choice to support her or me. He chose me.”

Voters, he added, “have a choice between a teacher and somebody who’s never been in a classroom. Someone who stands for higher standards and fundamentals in reading and math, and someone known for the most fuzzy reading and teaching [ideas] in the state.”

The dispute between 3rd District incumbent Jeff Horton and his challenger, IBM executive Caprice Young, was equally edgy.

Horton said he wanted to be reelected to complete reforms implemented during his tenure which are only beginning to generate improvements in student test scores and to carry out policies that determine where new schools should be built.

“Our public schools are the best bargains in town,” he said.

However, Young blamed Horton and the other board members for abysmally low test scores, as well as questionable policy decisions such as those that spawned the environmental problems at the $200-million Belmont Learning Complex.

“Two-thirds of our third-graders are not reading at grade level,” she said. And, she added, with the seeming intransigence of the district’s vast bureaucracy, “our parents are running up a down escalator.”

Absent at the forum were 7th District incumbent George Kiriyama and 1st District incumbent Barbara Boudreaux, who has missed a series of opportunities to debate her lead opponent, Genethia Hayes, an education activist and executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“She’s not showing up, and it deprives voters of their right to hear all sides of the issues,” Hayes said in an interview. “If she had a record she was proud of, I believe she’d come out every time.”

Earlier this week, Boudreaux said she has decided to avoid public appearances at venues that she believes may be somehow linked to Mayor Richard Riordan, who is backing three challengers and incumbent Tokofsky.