School Board Postpones Cortines Interview

The Los Angeles Board of Education postponed its interview of interim superintendent candidate Ramon C. Cortines on Tuesday after he and Supt. Ruben Zacarias suggested it would be inappropriate to conduct such a meeting before there is a vacancy.

During the six-hour closed session to consider the replacement of Zacarias and other matters, the board received several new nominations and voted 4 to 2 to approve the general terms of a contract with Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller.

The board agreed to pay Miller, a real estate lawyer and former board member, $191,454 per year plus $10,000 in expenses and provide him a car. That would place his salary within $600 of Zacarias’ $192,000.

Board members Victoria Castro and Julie Korenstein, both supporters of Zacarias, opposed the contract; David Tokofsky was absent.

“I think the salary is exorbitant,” Korenstein said. “We shouldn’t use taxpayers’ money this way.”

Richard Sheehan, attorney for the board, said he is still drawing up the contract, which will be completed later in the week.

Board President Genethia Hayes said after the closed session that the meeting with Cortines, which would be the first for several members, was called off by board consensus after the closed session began.

“My understanding is that he and the superintendent both agreed--and I agreed with him when I talked to him--that you don’t have a need to interview anybody for a vacancy that isn’t there,” Hayes said.

The board is scheduled to reconvene the closed session Thursday. Hayes said the board has not yet discussed whether it would also conduct interviews with the new contenders, whose names were thrown into consideration by Tokofsky.

The new nominees are Maria Casillas, executive director of the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, or LAAMP, a business-supported school reform group; former L.A. Unified Supt. Harry Handler; Tony Alvarado, chancellor of instruction for the San Diego City School District; Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles); Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University; retired L.A. Unified administrator Paul Possemato; and Mayor Richard Riordan.

“We need a little humor out there,” Tokofsky had said earlier in explaining the plan to nominate Riordan.

Hayes said she has asked Tokofsky to bring resumes for the nominees to Thursday’s closed session. The board will review them and decide whether to add any to the list to be interviewed.

Hayes said Korenstein had also proposed two new nominations, but Korenstein denied it.

The recent district upheaval is “just beyond one’s wildest imagination,” Korenstein said. “I keep waiting for someone to wake me up. This whole thing is happening so fast, and it’s so without any planning or thoughtful process.”

Changes in the district management began in September when the board appointed Miller to oversee all school construction and maintenance.

On Oct. 12, it expanded his role to chief executive officer, in charge of all day-to-day operations. When Zacarias declared that arrangement unacceptable and rejected a compromise in which the board changed Miller’s title to chief operating officer, board members began a buyout process. Lawyers for Zacarias and the board are now working out the details.

That same day, Hayes nominated Cortines, a former superintendent in New York, San Francisco and Pasadena, as an interim replacement.

Hayes reasserted her support of Cortines on Tuesday, saying she considers him among the premier reform superintendents in the country.

She said she was aware that he has been named in a lawsuit alleging mishandling of child molestation allegations by the Pasadena Unified School District when he was its superintendent, but does not consider it significant at this point.

“People are sued all the time,” Hayes said. “My feeling is that people are innocent until proven guilty.”

The lawsuit concerns Muir High School track coach Clyde Turner, who was convicted in May of molesting a 15-year-old boy in his apartment near campus.

The suit alleges that the district failed to take proper action in 1984 when a student accused Turner of molesting him under similar circumstances.

In that case, a district official notified Cortines that Turner “did do something that could be interpreted as compromising one of our students,” but Turner received only a warning.

Turner later wrote a letter thanking Cortines for “the efforts you made to straighten this out.”

Hayes said that she had not yet spoken to Cortines about the incident but that she would expect to question him during his interview by the board. Cortines could not be reached for comment.

In other developments Tuesday, state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles)proposedlegislation that would require a plan for breaking up the district.

Polanco, who strongly opposed Zacarias’ ouster, said he decided to draft a bill in response to the leadership crisis in the district as well as a report of the Little Hoover Commission to be released today. The state watchdog agency calls for state intervention to correct a “disturbingly dysfunctional organization.”

Among its recommendations is the appointment of a panel of community leaders and professionals to study district breakup.

“The chaos at the district headquarters has moved me in the direction of breakup,” Polanco said. “It is time to bring our diverse Los Angeles communities together to engage in an open discussion about options to the behemoth we currently call L.A. Unified.”

Times correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.