Hayes on Way to Victory in Schools Race

Genethia Hayes headed toward victory over incumbent Los Angeles Unified School District board member Barbara M. Boudreaux in nearly complete returns Tuesday, completing a sweep of school board seats by candidates who were backed by Mayor Richard Riordan and committed to fundamentally changing the district.

The apparent victory by Hayes would give the Riordan-backed slate four seats on the seven-member board. The outcome would also vindicate Riordan’s high-risk strategy of directly involving himself in recruiting and financing candidates for the board--he injected about $2 million into what were formerly low-budget campaigns. At the same time, the result would make the mayor, and the candidates he backed, accountable for whether the city’s troubled schools can actually improve.

“People got the message,” Hayes said as the results came in. “Among all the wedges and blame, the voters heard that this is about not doing a lousy job with our black, brown and poor children.”

She also pledged that the immense financial support she received from Riordan would not make her obligated to the mayor. “I ran a campaign as an independent agent, a campaign of morals and integrity,” she said.

The mayor praised Hayes’ apparent election. “The voters are intelligent,” Riordan said. “They were able to cut through the rhetoric to elect Genethia Hayes, who really cares about children.”

At Boudreaux’s headquarters, the mood quickly turned somber. “We did all we could with what we had,” her campaign manager, Jewett Walker, said as first returns were released showing Hayes with a large lead. “We just ran out of money.”

The school board’s 1st District includes the heart of the city’s black community, from low-income neighborhoods south of downtown Los Angeles to middle-class areas of Baldwin Hills. The competition there between the two candidates, both black women with long civil rights records, sparked intense debates, not only about the schools, but also about the future and style of African American representation.

Hayes, 54, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Los Angeles branch, blamed Boudreaux for the district’s student test scores, which are the lowest in the city. She blasted what she called the incumbent’s lackluster track record during her eight years on the board. Hayes’ supporters labeled Boudreaux racially divisive and said their candidate would represent the district’s interests by building interracial coalitions.

Boudreaux, 65, called Hayes a puppet of Riordan, who helped raise more than $500,000 for the challenger. She accused the mayor of “plantation politics” for backing another black figure against her and said he was plotting to seize control of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $6.7-billion budget.

On several occasions, Boudreaux accused Hayes’ campaign of being behind acts of vandalism at her home. She also suggested that Hayes supporters could be tied to an assault on her 17-year-old granddaughter.

While Hayes had the support of the mayor, Boudreaux was backed by most of the black elected leaders in the state.

The campaign became “a conflict between two powerful factions”--the mayor and the black officials, said Robert Stern, co-director of the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit organization that studies campaign financing.

In a last-minute radio spot on the eve of the election, Boudreaux featured two of her most prominent elected supporters, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. That ad touted her accomplishments as a board member--a subject that some of her supporters felt had been underplayed because of her emphasis on attacking Riordan and Hayes.

But on election night, Boudreaux returned to her chief theme. “Our mayor is power drunk,” she told supporters at her campaign headquarters. “He thinks he is a king. Well, we don’t elect kings.”

Boudreaux is not the only incumbent who is angry over the unprecedented role Riordan played.

Hours before the polls closed, school board member Jeffrey Horton, who was defeated during the first round of voting in April, read a blistering farewell message at a board meeting, characterizing his defeat as “coup d’etat orchestrated by the city’s ruling elite.”

Horton singled out Riordan and Mark Willes, the former Los Angeles Times publisher who is chairman of Times Mirror Co., The Times’ parent company.

Horton said The Times, whose editorial page endorsed the Riordan-backed candidates, and other newspapers pursued a relentless campaign to discredit the public schools.

Willes, he said, possessed an “ivory tower view that public education is a disaster [that] stifled any discussion of reform efforts or the obstacles to improving the district.

“The cause of educational excellence in Los Angeles has been dealt a severe setback essentially because of the concentration of too much wealth and power in too few hands,” Horton said.

The money the mayor raised was clearly a factor in the Hayes-Boudreaux race. In April, Hayes surprised many by coming in ahead of Boudreaux. AFter that, she received an additional $319,007, much of it funneled into her camp from the mayor’s Coalition for Kids committee and the 40,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles, according to campaign filings. Overall, Hayes collected $834,658 after Jan. 1--a record for a school board campaign.

Boudreaux raised $462,413, including $143,407 during the runoff period. As in the primary, most of her money came from the union that represents the district’s principals, the Associated Administrators-Los Angeles, and the political committees of black elected leaders.

Hayes blanketed the district with full-color, multi-page brochures featuring her most well-known supporters, including Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and poet Maya Angelou.

With the help of foot soldiers from the teachers union, she also reached out to Latinos, who make up about 9% of the district’s registered voters. Her campaign also mounted an effort in the district’s few predominantly white areas, which Boudreaux’s campaign largely ignored.

The Angelou mailer went out to virtually every likely voter in the district, according to Parke Skelton, Hayes’ campaign mailer.

“Maya is not a politician, she’s a well-known and respected artist and educator,” Skelton said. “We felt there’s no one in the universe who wouldn’t be impressed by that.”

By the first week of June, even some of Boudreaux’s hard-core fans were beginning to turn on her.

“Initially, I favored Barbara,” said attorney Earl Williams, who is a friend of the incumbent’s husband, Albert, also an attorney. “Then I looked at the qualifications of Genethia. I was impressed. I don’t know Genethia. But she has a grasp of the issues and can articulate them.”

Political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson noted that “there were two powerful factors favoring Hayes: disgust with schools that are failed wrecks, and her very large bankroll.”

“Everywhere I went people were saying: ‘Damn it, we need change and anything is better than what we have now.’ ”

In another, less watched, schools race, Sylvia Scott-Hayes and Mona Field appeared headed for victory in their campaigns for seats on the Los Angeles Community College District board.