Governor May Reward School Group’s Loyalty

Courting the only branch of the education community to support all his school reforms last year, Gov. Gray Davis on Wednesday suggested that school boards’ continued loyalty could mean a boost in discretionary funds.

“I remember who stands with me, and this is the first [education] group I’ve come to speak to this year for a reason,” Davis said at a California School Boards Assn. conference near the Capitol.

Unlike the teachers unions, school administrators associations and even parent-teacher associations, the school boards group does not make campaign contributions. It is much smaller than the other, more powerful organizations.

But the California School Boards Assn. won the governor’s gratitude last year by being the only organization to stand behind all of his education reforms, even when the teacher and administrator groups did not. On Wednesday, Davis said he’s counting on them this year too.

“We proved to be a formidable team last year . . . [when] there were more naysayers than I could count,” he said. “Let’s make it two years in a row.”

During the half-hour speech at the Forecast 2000 conference, Davis said he will push for legislation to exempt retired teachers from losing their pensions if they return to the classroom full time, and he reiterated that he will run for reelection in 2002 only if student test scores improve.

Davis’ rocky relationship with the powerful California Teachers Assn. is no secret, and the school boards group could be an increasingly important ally.

The CTA was among Davis’ largest campaign contributors, but initially opposed all four of his reforms--ranging from high school graduation tests to a ranking system for schools. The union ultimately supported two of them.

This year, Davis has opposed the CTA’s proposed November ballot initiative to raise education spending to the national average--from the $6,313 per pupil proposed in this year’s budget to about $6,900.

In return for the school boards’ loyalty, Davis promised to consider boosting the portion of state education money controlled at the local level, known as discretionary funding. He said he had already rewarded the group by adding nearly $20 million to the maintenance budget--a pot of school repair money that endears school board members to their constituents.

If boom-time budget forecasts prove correct and if school board association lobbyist Kevin Gordon “keeps saying good things in the papers about me, discretionary funding is going up,” Davis said, to loud applause.

The school board organization has not been without concerns about the governor’s plans. Conference handouts included critical analysis of his proposed 2000-01 budget, highlighting the absence of discretionary funding compared with $200 million set aside last year.

And the group has joined others in the education community in grumbling about Davis’ new “call to arms” for teachers, in which he is urging young people to view teaching as temporary public service instead of a profession.

But California School Boards Assn. President Jeff Horton, a former Los Angeles Unified School District board member, said that on second look, “it’s a big improvement over what we have now.”