Zacarias Casts Shadow of Former School Board

Depending on your point of view, the overthrow of Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias was either the straightforward consequence of June’s lawful LAUSD election or a brutal palace coup. Whichever way you see it, you probably agreed that board President Genethia Hayes’ abrupt installation last week of attorney and former board member Howard Miller as the district’s de facto administrator has left a nasty aftertaste.

The following day, Zacarias, whom Hayes’ board majority had ordered into virtual on-the-job retirement, was fighting to regain his authority, trying to retroactively disqualify the man he’d eagerly and recently accepted as his facilities executive. On Friday, one of Sacramento’s mightiest legislators, Sen. Richard Polanco of East Los Angeles, led a rally urging that the board reconsider its action deposing Zacarias in favor of Miller.

Obviously, Mayor Richard Riordan, who fomented the June board takeover and apparently continues to mentor the new members who are beholden to him, hadn’t been able to head off a groundswell of pro-Zacarias protests in the Latino community, possibly due to the recent retirement of his key Latino ally, former City Councilman Richard Alatorre.

Meanwhile, virtually nothing seemed to be functioning inside the LAUSD’s bureaucratic citadel, where officials hunkered down, waiting for the shooting to cease and one side or the other to declare victory.

Meanwhile, news reports indicated that board members were working around the clock on an acceptable six-figure buyout package for the 70-year-old superintendent to make room for Miller (although Hayes denied these reports). As one insider put it, “As things stand, one of these men has to go, and it better be Zacarias.”

As this is being written, the decision that is the superintendent’s to make is whether a sufficient settlement can assuage the dignity of someone who’s said he would be happy to be leading the district well into his mid-70s.

That Zacarias’ Latino roots--rather than his competence--became an issue is not surprising. The Latino community is everywhere celebrating its long overdue state and local political power. At the public hearings that preceded the compilation of the new City Charter that passed in June, representatives of Latino communities expressed their fears that the new document might somehow--particularly in the matter of council expansion--undermine or slow its rising prominence. The ouster of any Latino leader for whatever reason--but particularly in the case of the official responsible for our school system, with its 70% Latino enrollment--is a similar matter of concern.

But Zacarias is more than the region’s second highest-ranking Latino official (after Sheriff Lee Baca). He’s the man most identified with the lackluster board members whose ouster Riordan accomplished--the people most responsible for the miserable decision-making that gave us, among many other problems, the $200-million Belmont Learning Complex disaster and an apparently similarly ill-picked project in South Gate.

It was the disclosure of the long-pending contamination on the South Gate campus that spurred Hayes to instigate the Miller coup.

And to say that Zacarias hasn’t distanced himself--by policy or action--from the former board is a gross understatement. After all, it was this former board that, in a gesture mean-spirited to everyone but Zacarias, refused to let its successors decide the superintendent’s future. The former board’s last-minute, yearlong extension of Zacarias’ contract to July 2001 was but one of several formidable booby traps it left behind to hazard the new regime, more in the spirit of enemy soldiers fleeing a liberated city than of defeated officeholders stepping aside for the lawfully elected newcomers.

If Zacarias had actually wanted to scream out that he was, indeed, ripe for the chop, he could not have done better than he did with his attorney’s recent, self-serving letter asserting that “the district is not in crisis.” Can he possibly be serious?

The new board majority was elected in the certainty that the LAUSD is not only in crisis but in mortal danger of impending dissolution if it cannot quickly solve the accrued problems resulting from 20 years of neglect.

Hayes’ allies on the board generously gave the superintendent more than three months to see things their way. Since he now publicly refuses to do so, he must go. Now.