It’s Broken; We’re Fixing It

To someone who sits in a big air-conditioned office in downtown Los Angeles, there may not appear to be a crisis at the Los Angeles Unified School District, but if you are a student in one of the district’s overcrowded, poorly maintained and underfunded schools, the view is much different.

If you are a student at South Gate High School, you are sharing a campus designed for 1,600 students in the 1930s with about three times that number today. Students at other overcrowded schools have to hunt for their teachers when they need help because the teachers don’t have assigned classrooms.

If you are a student at Fremont High School, you might have walked out of your classes to protest the deplorable conditions there. Students had to take matters into their own hands this summer, and their protest forced the school district to do something about the corroded water fountains, missing ceiling tiles and clogged toilets.

If you were a young student at Queen Anne Place in my district, you couldn’t even find a bathroom that was fit to be used. One student from another school, University High, was quoted in The Times saying she would rather wait all day and use the bathroom at home because conditions at school were so bad. Queen Anne is another instance where it has taken seven years to build a school.

The list of problems at LAUSD schools seems to be unending. Now it appears the new South Gate school site is going down the same road as Belmont. Test scores aren’t rising fast enough, students are studying from textbooks that are literally falling apart.

With all the other problems LAUSD needs to address, the district appears to be overwhelmed by the task of building 100 new schools in the next 10 years. District officials have failed the current and future students of the district through monumental fiascoes such as the Belmont Learning Complex. The problems now being unearthed at South Gate show that district staff have learned almost nothing in the last year.

There is a crisis at Los Angeles Unified. It’s a crisis of management, and it involves the entire culture that has developed at the nation’s second-largest educational bureaucracy. In April, the voters agreed that the LAUSD needed sweeping reforms. Three new board members were elected with a promise to change the way the school district operates.

With our motion last Tuesday to place Howard Miller in charge of day-to-day operations, we took a step toward making good on that promise. Miller is a capable and experienced leader who understands the need to reform the management structure at the district.

The board members who support Miller’s interim appointment are not out to get Superintendent Ruben Zacarias. Zacarias has been an outstanding educator and dedicated employee of the school district for more than 30 years. Unfortunately, he has not been able to bring about the significant and rapid changes needed.

Maybe we could have taken more time to make this decision, but time is of the essence. We can’t afford to lose one more day.

One of the most vexing problems for investigators and board members has been trying to determine who is in charge. A new management structure will allow the board and Zacarias to get answers to all our questions about the performance of the school district.

The board’s action to require all LAUSD staff report to Miller will immediately deal with the problem of who’s in charge, while Zacarias and the board design a new and more effective structure for overseeing the day-to-day work of educating our children and building new schools.

What LAUSD students don’t need right now is more buck passing and posturing by district officials. They need clean bathrooms, books they can read and classrooms that are safe, clean and not overcrowded. Everyone who cares about the future of the children in our schools should make those their top priorities.