School Board Chief Both Loved, Hated

There are people who hate Genethia Hayes, the president of the Los Angeles Board of Education. They doubt her honesty, her independence, her civility and her accomplishments; they say she is a puppet of Mayor Richard Riordan, an arrogant, foulmouthed careerist who will stop at nothing in her path.

There are also a lot of people who admire, even adore her. They say she is brutally honest, brilliant and articulate, a puppet of no one, a compassionate woman with a strong inner compass and deep religious faith who will stop at nothing in her path.

On this last point, at least, there is agreement.

“I would, of course, always try to build consensus,” said Hayes, during two days of interviews last month.

But if that fails and she believes others are standing between her and her goal, “I will bowl those people right out of the way. . . . No, I will not build consensus with those people.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District, an immovable object if ever there was one, has met an irresistible force in the sharp form of Genethia Hudley Hayes.

Since taking over the school board presidency in July, she has leaped into the public spotlight as the woman who spearheaded the effort to oust then-Supt. Ruben Zacarias in the midst of environmental scandals at the Belmont Learning Complex and other school sites.

Last Friday Zacarias left his post, replaced by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who began by making two bold promises that attest to just how bad things have gotten: By June 30, he said, all pupils will have clean bathrooms and all the textbooks they need.

Hayes says this is just the beginning. She wants to do what school reformers have talked about for years--making the nation’s second-largest school district leaner and smarter, capable of giving a quality education to rich and poor students alike.

The obstacles are overwhelming:

* A huge and deep-rooted bureaucracy.

* A student population of 711,000, nearly half of whom have a limited command of English and 72% of whom are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized meals.

* High dropout rates.

* Secession movements.

‘She Thinks Like a Revolutionary’

But if anyone can turn things around, her supporters say, maybe, just maybe, it’s Hayes.

“You don’t run across a lot of Genethia Hayeses in life,” said one of her best friends, Constance Rice, western regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “She’s smart, she has a vision, she knows how to get stuff done, she’s fearless.”

“She thinks like a revolutionary and she acts like a revolutionary,” said Riordan, who helped raise more than $500,000 for Hayes’ campaign. “And that’s what you need when you have a school system that’s totally, completely dysfunctional.”

Critics say they, too, haven’t run across many people like her. They portray her as Riordan’s hatchet woman, commandeering the Board of Education and running roughshod over well-meaning district administrators.

“They have a tiger in there, and that tiger is going berserk,” said Barbara Boudreaux, whom Hayes defeated in the school board race last spring.

Ray Reisler, who heads a major foundation in Los Angeles, worked with Hayes on a statewide education policy group in the early 1990s.

“Genethia was scorpion-like in the speed and propensity with which she could turn against anyone who would not cave in to her harangues about the right or righteous way,” he said. “Clearly, getting in her way was a dangerous proposition.”

Two views and, perhaps, two sides of a single--and single-minded--personality.

Short in stature, conservative in dress, Hayes has a purposeful, streamlined air, accentuated by half-inch wavy hair, buzz-cut on the sides. To understand her is to understand noblesse oblige among African Americans and to understand a family that has been drawn to education the way the Kennedys were drawn to politics or Windsors to the throne.

Her mother was a teacher at Manual Arts High School. Her daughter teaches English in Santiago, Chile. Her husband is principal of an L.A. Unified preschool. Her older sister is a district administrator. Her younger sister is a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara.

Her aunt, Claudia Hampton, was an L.A. Unified teacher who became the first African American named to the California State University Board of Trustees and its first woman president. A great uncle was a professor at the University of Chicago, a remarkable achievement before the civil rights era.

Hayes says no one in her family was surprised when, at the age of 54, she became president of the Board of Education, only that it took her so long.

Born in Chicago in 1945, Genethia Hudley was the second of three sisters and one of 10 cousins in a close-knit clan that spent every summer at the lakeside resort of Idlewild, Mich., a playground of the black middle class whose seasonal visitors included W.E.B. DuBois. Her nickname was Weenie; her sisters were called Twinkles and Button.

The Hudleys were not rich--Genethia’s father ran an auto body shop--but they were comfortable, and the parents made sure they knew it. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” was the family motto.

In 1958, their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles made a joint decision to move to Los Angeles where, they believed, the schools would be better. They settled within blocks of each other in Leimert Park.

Hayes graduated from Dorsey High in 1963. She had been a cheerleader, a student council member, but not an academic standout. She enrolled at Cal State L.A., but dropped out after two years, unhappy with the school, uncertain about where she was going.

Finally, acting on a neighbor’s advice, she enrolled at Texas College, a church-affiliated, historically black school in small, segregated Tyler, Texas.

The women in the Hudley clan were Episcopalians, in the tradition of the African American elite. Not so much Genethia’s father, a strong, quiet man whose given name was General Hudley. He wasn’t a churchgoer. But the true general of the house, mother Cynthia Cox Hudley, made sure her three daughters were at church every Sunday.

So when Hayes got to Texas, among her first tasks was finding an Episcopal church. There were two in Tyler, a black one and a white one. Hayes, whose church in Los Angeles had been integrated, looked at both and decided she liked the big church downtown. The white one.

The first time Hayes went to church in Tyler, she said, “the priest stood up and said they were going to have morning prayer instead of communion.”

It was unusual because the central rite of the Episcopal church is communion, in which a single cup of wine representing the blood of the savior is passed among the congregation. All lips touch the cup.

The same thing happened the next Sunday, and the one after that.

“Well, by the time I had that experience for the third time, it was very clear to me that something was going on. And I began to look around and pay attention to myself and realize that I was the only black person in church.”

The fourth time, she took the priest aside to complain. He said he was only following the wishes of his congregants.

“ ‘My God!’ I said to him. ‘You are the Christian leader. How could you go along with something that you know is as evil as not wanting to do communion because these people are terrified that I’m going to drink out of the same cup with them? How do you countenance that?’ . . . It was a--what do you call those kinds of experiences? It was a defining experience of my life.”

She called her mother, crying. Then she called her parish priest in Los Angeles, the Rev. Canon Lewis Bohler, who remembers telling her: “Don’t leave your church. Improve it, and improve it from the inside. . . . You have a great church you belong to. You have run into a splinter--that’s all.”

Inspired, Hayes said she brought a group of black students from Texas College to services at the church. Eventually, some of the younger white members began sitting with them. Finally, the church agreed to hold communion for all.

Bohler, she said, “taught me my first lesson in organizing.”

In her last year of college she married Alton Hayes, a quiet, self-possessed student from Houston. After graduation in 1970, they settled in Los Angeles. Their daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1970. The next year, Hayes embarked on her career.

From late 1971 until early 1974, Hayes worked as a teacher at L.A. Unified preschools. After taking off a few years to be home with her daughter and earn a master’s degree in education from Pepperdine, she became a teacher and then principal at the Holy Nativity Episcopal school in Inglewood.

One motivation for the job was that her daughter would get free tuition. It is one of the ironies of Hayes’ life--some call it hypocrisy--that her daughter never spent a day in public school. “That has probably been the saddest thing for me,” Hayes said, “because I’m such a believer in public schools.”

The job at Holy Nativity lasted five years, until the Episcopal diocese closed the school.

Activist Post Led to Riordan Friendship

Hayes took a job in 1985 running an education program with the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, encouraging low-income parents to participate in school affairs. When local Executive Director Joe Hicks left the organization in 1996, Hayes was elected to succeed him. She still holds the post, although she intends to step down.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, best known as the organization founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is a minor player among Los Angeles civil rights organizations. Still, its leadership gave Hayes access. Three weeks after taking over as executive director, she went with Riordan on a trip to Israel.

The friendship they forged led Riordan to endorse Hayes for school board in the campaign earlier this year. The mayor successfully supported three challengers and one incumbent, and those four constitute a new majority on the seven-member board. But contrary to what many have said, both Hayes and Riordan insist it was her idea to run, not his.

“Bottom line is, she was invited to a meeting of leaders to talk about supporting people who ran against incumbents. And at that meeting, she announced that she was going to run for school board,” Riordan said. “And then she announced that even if we didn’t endorse her, she’d run.”

Hayes gave a similar account. In the spring of 1998, she said, her disgust with the school board had mounted to the level of fury. Her father challenged her: “What are you going to do about it?” She decided to run.

It was an ugly campaign. Boudreaux was supported by nearly the entire African American leadership of the city and Hayes by Riordan and an amalgam of lawyers and entertainment moguls. In the end, Hayes raised $900,000, more than twice as much as Boudreaux, and defeated her in a runoff.

The morning after her June 8 victory, Hayes, her husband and five or six supporters had breakfast at the Boulevard Cafe in Leimert Park, not far from her home.

The Boulevard Cafe is owned by former state Assemblyman Frank Holoman, who was among the African American leaders supporting Boudreaux. Her campaign headquarters were next door. “It was an in-your-face kind of thing,” Holoman said.

After breakfast, as Hayes and her group were leaving, they noticed a car in the parking lot that had a trunk filled with political lawn signs. Two of Boudreaux’s campaign workers, Miles Spear and Monroe Smith, said they had collected signs from both campaigns so they could use the sticks in future campaigns.

Hayes said she only saw her signs, which she assumed had been stolen. She and her group made a beeline for the car. So did Spear, Smith and Boudreaux’s son and daughter-in-law.

The two groups began shouting and finger-pointing.

“The biggest thing they said was, ‘We kicked your ass,’ ” recalled Spear. “You know, usually when people win something, you don’t go around and antagonize the opponent.”

“I watched the whole scene, and . . . I thought it was appalling,” Boudreaux said.

She, Spear and Smith all said Hayes swore at Boudreaux’s group, and got in her car. “And then,” Boudreaux said, “I saw her lean out the car and give the finger.”

Hayes looked rueful recalling the incident. “We should not have done it,” she said. But she denied having sworn or made an obscene gesture.

Zacarias Ouster Angered Many Latinos

What happened that day gave ammunition to critics who say she doesn’t think about how what she says and does affects others. Those charges resurfaced a short time later in a far more serious confrontation: the one with Zacarias.

The superintendent’s ouster infuriated Latino leaders, who accused the board--and, especially, Hayes--of insulting Zacarias and, by extension, the entire Latino community.

Hayes had always considered herself an ally of Latinos. She sided with Latinos against African American leaders in a fight over school board redistricting in 1992. She joined protests when an African American police officer in Compton beat a Latino teen in 1994. She fought Proposition 227, the 1998 initiative to end bilingual education in public schools. She prides herself on her Spanish.

Hicks, now head of the city’s Human Relations Commission, sees Hayes as a new kind of leader, someone with “a strong belief in race-transcendent politics.”

But, as much as she might have wanted, the Zacarias episode did not transcend race.

Hayes said she never intended to insult the superintendent, and that she saw the appointment of Westside lawyer Howard Miller as the district’s chief executive last fall as freeing Zacarias from the nuts and bolts of administration so that he could better lead the district.

None of Hayes’ critics believed that.

When pressed about Zacarias’ vision, she said, “Do I think he knew how to get us there? No, I don’t. But I think with Howard Miller’s help we could have gotten there.”

Hayes has her own very clear idea of where she wants the district to go. It is a vision drawn in part from her reading of Jonathan Kozol’s 1992 book “Savage Inequalities,” about how the poor and minorities are ill-served by American public schools.

In her frequent visits to schools, Hayes talks about redistributing district resources, so that, for instance, a majority of young teachers with temporary teaching credentials don’t wind up in schools with the city’s poorest children, as is the case now.

She talks about changing attitudes at district headquarters, where she believes bureaucrats have stopped being accountable. She tells principals she wants them to have greater power over spending and hiring; and for teachers, more training and support.

In her inaugural address, Hayes said her top priority was to give Zacarias the support “to soar and to fly and to, unfettered, lead this district into the next millennium.” Those words would be repeated bitterly by supporters of Zacarias after the superintendent bowed to the inevitable and negotiated a $750,000 buyout. Hayes said the board did the right thing.

“I am pained by the reaction of the Latino community,” she said. “And it does not matter that I say to you that I did not intend to insult them.

“I think now I have to work at reestablishing the relationships that I’ve disturbed, and I have to work really hard at it. But I am not . . . going to apologize for it forever. I am not going to have to say mea culpa every day.”

Hayes is too proud, too certain of the essential rightness of her path, to bow her head for long. It is her greatest strength--and weakness. “I’m not a politician,” she said.

But the evidence, so far, is that Hayes is learning to be one. Fellow board members say she is honing her political abilities and smoothing her course after a rocky start.

At first, board member Julie Korenstein said, Hayes tended to act without consulting her colleagues. “I think there’s been an attempt more recently to bring people into the decision-making process,” she said.

‘Clearly the Leader’ of School Board

Board members are nearly unanimous in saying, sometimes grudgingly, that Hayes has emerged as more than just the titular head of the board.

“She’s clearly the leader,” said Caprice Young, another new member who is among Hayes’ closest allies on the board. “She considers it her responsibility to get the pulse of the board and to know where people stand . . . and to bring us together.

“She’s a consensus builder to an extent,” Young added, “but when there’s no consensus, she’ll get out in front and say, ‘Go this way.’ ”

As the lone Latina on a board representing a district in which 68.5% of the students are Latino, Victoria Castro was a leader in opposing Hayes and the board majority in its effort to oust Zacarias. Yet she said: “I believe she is moving forward from her perspective on what she believes is best for the district. And that is what I believe motivates her. Do I take exception with that agenda and that perspective? Absolutely.”

No board member has opposed Hayes more consistently than David Tokofsky, a maverick who was supported by Riordan for reelection but has frequently voted against the “Riordan slate.” He lost to Hayes in the vote for board president and hasn’t hidden his criticism of her or his suspicion that she, Young and Mike Lansing, the other Riordan-supported board member, are too closely tied to the mayor.

“But there’s no question that, collectively, the three of them reflect a refreshing spirit of change that is much more willing to be empirical, much more willing to think out of the box, much more impatient, much more thoughtful,” he said.

Alone among them, he said, Hayes brought with her a deep understanding of the district and its history. He recalled a fall meeting in which she helped push through a buyout of General Counsel Richard K. Mason, a long-tenured and well-respected lawyer for the district who had been criticized as one of the highest-ranking executives responsible for the environmental scandal surrounding the Belmont Learning Complex, the downtown high school on which construction was halted because it was being built on a toxic site.

“She shed tears, even though she joined the vote to accept his resignation and buyout,” Tokofsky recalled. “Because she realized that transforming the institution and doing the change had to do with real people who had done real things for real kids.”

Other board members noted that, after a few crucial 4-3 votes, including early decisions regarding Zacarias, Hayes has been able to shepherd her colleagues to unanimous votes with increasing frequency. Among the 7-0 votes have been those on such critical issues as Zacarias’ retirement package and the hiring of Cortines. Hayes has almost never been on the losing end of a vote.

Other board members have played important roles. But Hayes, who does most of her work behind the scenes, in the warren of offices the board members share at 450 N. Grand Ave., has been the strongest force, and has won praise for her efforts to build consensus.

Members of the Board of Education only rarely have made the leap to higher office in Los Angeles, and with good reason--few have been able to point to tangible success in improving city schools. Hayes said she has no interest in any other job; education, not politics, is her calling.

But what if the board were truly able to carry out a revolution? What if she were seen as the catalyst? For those who follow the city’s politics, it’s hard to resist speculation.

“If Ms. Hayes is able to put together the structure and make things meaningfully happen, she would be out of reach,” said Celes King III, state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. King supported Boudreaux in last spring’s election, and still questions the extent to which Hayes is under Riordan’s control. But he concedes a grudging respect.

“She can turn out to be a significant power,” he said.

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* SCHOOLS CHIEF SPEAKS OUT

Ramon Cortines says L.A. Unified has been doing too little and getting away with too much. B1