LAUSD’s Ailing Culture

Ask anyone in charge at the Los Angeles Unified School District how the Belmont high school environmental fiasco happened and they will point fingers at two retirees: former Supt. Sid Thompson and his omnipotent chief of planning and development, Dominic Shambra. But, as state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) pointed out Monday, “Getting rid of a few individuals will not get rid of this problem.” A couple of departures cannot cure an LAUSD culture that too often promotes on the basis of longevity and personal relationships.

Take the example of Shambra, a former teacher and principal entrusted with all of the district’s big business deals. There is no way he could have acquired the expertise to do business with Donald Trump, who expensively sued and stalled the district when it tried to acquire the old Ambassador Hotel site for a high school. Or to negotiate high-stakes private/public partnerships like the $200,000 Belmont complex, a deal that was done without competitive bidding.

What new checks and balances have been put in place by the current superintendent, Ruben Zacarias, to prevent future Belmonts? He cites the dissolution of Shambra’s old department and the creation of a chief administrative officer and new school safety teams, which evaluate schools and sites with potential environmental problems. But given the politics of the district, could either the CAO or the safety teams block a project like Belmont?

One ominous sign is that the only head to roll so far over Belmont is that of an outside lawyer on the deal, not a district employee. David W. Cartwright of O’Melveny & Myers represented the school district on the Belmont deal, which was snagged by the controversial developer Kajima International, also represented by O’Melveny & Myers. That obvious conflict of interest was explained away at the time by the district’s own legal counsel, Richard K. Mason, who still has his job.

Also dismissed--and never passed on to the school board--were concerns in a 1994 memo from the district’s real estate chief about an inadequate environmental assessment. That warning should have prompted more thorough testing of the site long before the project was approved. Instead it was buried until it was uncovered by Times reporters when the school was half-built. Again, an atmosphere of go along to get along prevailed.

Four state legislators, Hayden among them, are calling for a criminal investigation. Supt. Zacarias seeks an independent state audit by various state legislators, including Hayden, who has proposed stripping real estate functions and environmental cleanup responsibilities from local school districts and giving those jobs to government agencies. Such reforms are proposals worth considering but ultimately worth nothing unless the culture of the district--in which whom you know counts more than what you know and in which outsiders are viewed as enemies--is uprooted and transformed.