One Year Later, Romer Is Taming an Unruly District

Like the white-hatted marshal of an old-time movie, ex-Colorado Gov. Roy Romer rode into town a year ago, his eye on the job that just about nobody else in America would have.

This drawling cowboy politician, millionaire tractor salesman and septuagenarian good ol’ boy was offering to lead what was reputedly the nation’s most mixed-up school system, one bogged down in racial infighting and facing the threat of state takeover.

One by one, the four other finalists for the superintendency of the Los Angeles Unified School District dropped out, leaving the school board virtually stuck with the man whose out-sized ego and blunt manner made some of them flinch.

No wonder pundits quickly tagged Romer, the first outsider to lead the giant district in a decade, as a poor fit--and, very likely, a short-termer.

Now, as Romer’s first anniversary in office approaches and he shows no signs of leaving, even these early skeptics view him as a highly skilled politician with a deceptively unrefined veneer. And it’s dead wrong, they say, to underestimate him.

“He is more thoughtful than I originally thought,” said board President Genethia Hayes, who initially clashed with the superintendent and is known, generally, as a tough judge of those in positions of power.

“I think that Romer actually is doing a good job,” she said. “A good, solid job.”

Often self-absorbed, intolerant of complainers, demanding and at times profane, Romer would not appear ideally cast for the top job at L.A. Unified.

Still, he is receiving glowing reviews from Los Angeles power brokers, union leaders and a host of Latino politicians angered by the board’s removal of Romer’s Latino predecessor, Ruben Zacarias.

For now, the knives are sheathed even in Sacramento, where, only a year ago, the district was regarded, in Hayes’ words, as “the children of the damned.”

“He has the ideas and the [guts] to get things done,” said Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh (D-Los Angeles).

By most accounts, Romer, 72, is indeed getting things done. He’s built a senior staff headed by outside talent, but also incorporated the brightest of the team he inherited. He recently settled, without a strike, the most difficult teacher contract negotiations in nearly a decade.

In addition, he has begun refocusing the district machinery on teaching after years of distractions.

“He’s just a no-nonsense, let’s-get-to-it guy . . . with a laser focus on improving instruction,” said Gordon Wohlers, the district’s longtime head of planning and research.

Yet, Romer sees his job as just beginning. Ahead lie relentless school construction deadlines with stiff penalties for delays; budget cuts to pay for the teacher raise, and escalating pressure to improve test scores, cut dropout rates and increase the share of teachers with credentials.

Proponents of reform are already impatient. “Where’s the proof that things are getting better?” asked Bill Mabie, aide to state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), who launched a nearly successful bid to place L.A. Unified under state control after Zacarias was removed.

Some who know Romer say he lacks the charm of his predecessor, a former teacher who always seemed most in his element when surrounded by children. In his first nine months, Romer seldom visited schools, and when told of students’ complaints about crowded classrooms, his first reaction was one he later regretted: “It sounds like they’re children whining.”

Though criticism of Romer has been restrained, there are rumblings.

Leaders of Los Angeles’ 10-year-old school reform movement chafe at Romer’s command-and-control style. By pushing the board to allow schools a choice between only two math programs, he appeared to take aim at localized budget and curriculum decisions.

“What we are looking for is a clear decision . . . about what will be locally decided and centrally decided,” said Sonia Hernandez, president of the reform alliance. “That level of clarity is not there yet.”

Despite a hard-driving management style, Romer has been accused by some of being too soft on the district’s lumbering bureaucracy.

“The people who talk to him and have access to him are old-think L.A. Unified bureaucrats,” said one veteran Los Angeles school reform leader, who insisted on anonymity. “He’s really got to move some of those people aside.”

Though he once observed that the rough and tumble of Los Angeles politics had “shocked” him, Romer knows how to fight back.

When Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley sent him a curt letter warning that the district’s environmentally plagued project at the Belmont Learning Complex had been designated a “crime scene,” Romer publicly derided the comments as “foolish” grandstanding. He also lectured Mayor Richard Riordan--though more gently--when the mayor complained that the district never dumps failing principals.

“I think the mayor can be very helpful,” Romer said at a news conference. “This one day, he wasn’t helpful at all.”

The tension between the men has at times been palpable. But Riordan--who plans to work for the district when his term ends--publicly praises the superintendent.

One of the surprises in Romer’s leadership of L.A. Unified was his decision not to bring a trusted advisor along, as insulation from the district’s often bitter and byzantine politics. Still, he managed to win the loyalty of 11 local district superintendents picked by his predecessor.

He next set about repairing relations with a 43,000-member teachers union that had pegged dozens of principals as “lemons” and feuded with former superintendents. By February, after reaching a contract settlement, United Teachers-Los Angeles President Day Higuchi declared that an era of cooperation had been launched.

More Mellow, With Occasional Eruptions

Romer has mellowed, though certainly not gone soft, with age. The bouts of anger that were legendary in Colorado have subsided some, though he still occasionally erupts. Just Thursday, he publicly scolded a reform group that released a parents’ survey critical of the district, complaining that it ignored improvements under his leadership.

Staffers characterize this as intensity, not rage. Said Wohlers, he has a “a deep, heartfelt sense of urgency.” Romer is demanding, so much so that his subordinates once joked that the way to curry favor was to propose Sunday meetings at 7 a.m.

“He’s on 24 hours a day,” said local district Supt. Merle Price.

His work ethic is rooted in a childhood on the eastern Colorado plains. “I was so young,” he said, eyebrows scrunched in distant recollection. “There would be a whirling blizzard, and I would be out alone on a white horse trying to find some cattle that got lost in the wheat fields. My father would get me up out of bed and say, ‘We’ve got to go find these cattle.’ He’d go one way and I’d go the other.”

His stories cover an amazing array of endeavors. Romer graduated from agricultural college, climbing the Matterhorn in his senior year, then went to law school. He served two years in the Air Force, touring Europe as a military prosecutor. He then enrolled in Yale Divinity School before entering politics.

After a decade in the Colorado Legislature, he lost a U.S. Senate bid and was effectively banished from politics for 10 years because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

During the hiatus from politics, he founded a flight school and expanded his father’s tractor business into the nation’s largest chain of John Deere dealerships, becoming a millionaire in the process. Then he returned to state politics, and in 1987, was elected governor.

He found success as a centrist. He was credited with guiding the state from recession to economic boom and also pursued a broad educational agenda, almost presciently embracing the movement to hold schools and students accountable for their performance.

He left office in 1998 as one of the most popular governors in Colorado history and two years later was named chairman of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

But he dropped that job after being persuaded by billionaire financier Eli Broad that he belonged at L.A. Unified.

“I knew psychologically I needed hard work,” he said. “I get the most meaning out of being forced every day to use all the capacity I have.”

In Los Angeles, Romer has dropped the dashing bomber jacket of his Colorado Statehouse days in favor of business suits. But he hangs on to some fashion quirks: leather-top hiking boots and a bulging 30-year-old briefcase--once reupholstered--that hangs at his side like a security blanket.

Personally, Romer is an expressive man who communicates as much with his animated eyebrows as with words. His face signals rapid mood changes from pensive sadness to glowering disappointment to boyish self-satisfaction.

He is as strong and stout as a draft horse, thanks to regular furloughs to his 500-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies.

“I love physical work,” he said. “I mend fences, I dig trenches, I cut timber. . . . I clean the swamps. I’m trying to create a new lake.”

His mind at times runs like a wild horse. Sometimes, he’s up at 3:30 a.m. devouring books. He said he’s read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” since becoming superintendent, along with reams of turgid educational tracts.

On coming to Los Angeles, he had just three lifestyle demands, all well within the limits of his $250,000 annual salary: to live beside the ocean, drive a convertible and get a set of Vandersteen 5 speakers--a music lover’s dream.

These days, he drives a used Mercedes convertible. At home in his Venice apartment, he can see the beach from his balcony. His otherwise sparse living room is dominated by black obelisk-like speakers that blast vocal music of intense expression: Hugh Masekela and French pop star Jacques Brel.

His wife, Bea, whose serenity contrasts strikingly with his restless drive, spends alternate weeks at the apartment and the Colorado homestead. The union has produced seven children and 18 grandchildren. And it has been molded by the demands of public life.

The marriage survived its biggest crisis when reporters in Colorado caught Romer in an infidelity that he had previously denied. He smoothed over the furor in a news conference with Bea at his side, saying she had “accepted” the relationship as something that had invigorated his life.

Today his wife accompanies him as a nearly silent partner. He introduces her with beaming pride and often finishes her sentences for her.

Romer’s success, subordinates say, has a lot to do with his capacity for listening and self-evaluation. He works to bring his thoughts and actions into line with his ideals. Thus the year in divinity school, where he says he learned to see life through others’ eyes.

“I’m white, middle class, rural, male, a heterosexual,” he said. “That’s very different from somebody who is black, female, communist, lives in Cuba, is homosexual.”

His greatest challenge was accepting homosexuals as “equal in the sight of God.”

He changed his feelings, he said, after befriending a couple from his church whose son was homosexual. He attended a support group with them.

“I always take very seriously people who oppose me, because I could be wrong,” he said. “You’ve got to keep listening to all your critics.”

Like Riding a Bucking Bronco

The job of an urban superintendent is a lot like that of a flailing rodeo cowboy who must hang on by a cinch rope while spurring the horse. More than once Romer has spurred himself into peril.

His quick determination that the partially built Belmont project should be completed miffed board members who had voted to abandon the downtown high school, located on an oil field that leaks toxic and flammable gases.

Romer prevailed early this year when the board voted 4 to 3 to seek new proposals either to complete the school or take the property off the district’s hands.

Even riskier was the 15% pay and benefit increase he negotiated with the teachers. Three of seven school board members called the contract, which leaves the district with a $153-million deficit, irresponsible.

Still, Romer escaped a drubbing in part because the board appreciated his overall performance.

“Romer yells at me and I yell back,” said school board member Caprice Young, who opposed the contract. “That doesn’t mean I have any less confidence in him as superintendent.”

Romer said he expects to finish out his three-year contract. After that, it’s hard to know.

“I got so many days to live. . . . I just value each one of them. The most meaning I get is doing important work and doing it well.”

Though Romer still lacks nothing in stamina and rugged charm, his age sometimes shows.

On a recent alliance-building trip to Sacramento, he scored political points easily with a succession of baby-faced legislators, yet he struggled, in many encounters, to make a personal connection.

Then came Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara). Romer warmed visibly in the waiting room lined by photos of the senator as a 1960s activist. Soon the two grandfathers were face-to-face, matching stories like old warriors.

“I was a dove on Vietnam even before Eugene McCarthy,” Romer boasted.

For the first time in a day of meetings, he scrapped his standard pitch in defense of the teacher contract.

“I’d like to tell you where my journey is,” he said. “We have a lot of challenges in this district. . . . It’s almost like a mountain you can’t climb.”

“You gotta climb it,” Vasconcellos retorted.

Romer thinks he can. At 5, he’d faced prairie blizzards alone on a horse. This time, it’s nothing but a mountain.