Parents Say Bureaucracy Is Luring Teachers Away

The recent departure of several veteran teachers and administrators from the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies has prompted outrage among some parents, who complain that a new district bureaucracy is raiding the highly regarded magnet school.

Since June, as many as nine teachers and administrators have left the school, one of only two all-magnet campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Several have taken jobs with District A, one of 11 new administrative bodies established in July in a decentralization effort led by new Supt. Roy Romer.

“We didn’t create these mini-districts so we could take teachers and promote them to middle management, that wasn’t the point,” said parent Wendy Goldzband, whose daughter’s math teacher will leave shortly to serve as an administrator in District A.

District officials said that by law, they cannot keep school personnel from applying for better jobs.

While reducing staff in the district’s central office, the reorganization plan has created dozens of new positions in the 11 new subdistrict offices, according to a Times study earlier this year.

Officials said many schools across the district have been similarly affected.

“It did happen throughout the district to some extent because it gave some of these people an opportunity to be promoted within the system,” said Stephanie Brady, director of communications for the LAUSD.

The 1,700-student Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies draws fourth-through-12th graders from all over the city, 95% of whom are bused in. The school is located within District C, an area roughly bisected by Ventura Boulevard.

Staff members who departed for administrative or teaching jobs within District A--which stretches from Woodland Hills to North Hills--include Principal Larry Rubin, a technology teacher, the head of the math department, a vice principal and a science teacher.

Rubin said the departure total is no greater than in other years. He said he lost seven to 14 teachers annually during his time at the school.

“That number is not out of line at all,” he said. “It’s a constant factor we had to deal with.”

But parents said those who left were the school’s most senior teachers and administrators, and that several exited abruptly at the beginning of the academic year, leaving the school scrambling to find replacements.

“The fact that they are allowing these transfers, midyear, with no replacements, no planning, where at best we will get substitutes, that is the thing that is scaring us,” said parent Michael Tashman.

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Robert Weinberg, the center’s new principal who arrived from Granada Hills High School in District A three weeks ago, said parents complained by phone and in person.

“Something like this has not happened at any school I have been at before,” he said. “Usually you start looking in the spring and you have the summer to interview. That is not the case here.”

He said those who left will be difficult to replace.

“They were coordinators, department chairs and our instructional experts here,” he said. “They are the people that, if I were in that position, I would go after, too.”

Deborah Leidner, District A superintendent, denied a raid had taken place.

“Unfortunately, people do have a choice to go after promotional opportunities,” Leidner said. “It’s not as though we went out recruiting.”

School board member Julie Korenstein expressed alarm at the situation.

“We need people in our schools, not in our district offices,” Korenstein said. “Principals and other administrators have left to go to district offices. It has really depleted our schools.”

Robert Collins, superintendent of District C, said he will meet with concerned parents at the school in the first week of November.