School Board’s Field Trips Offer Special Lessons

The Los Angeles Board of Education takes field trips too, kids. But they don’t get to visit zoos or aquariums, museums or parks. Instead, the seven school czars and czarinas pack up their thick three-ring binders and take their often tedious business to a school near a freeway.

As it does four times a year, the board left its downtown Los Angeles headquarters Tuesday for a school auditorium that could hold the seven members, the dozens of Los Angeles Unified School District staff who appeared before them, TV cameras that broadcast the meeting, more than 40 public speakers who weighed in on the afternoon’s agenda and the board’s usual swarm of gadflies.

Riverside Drive Elementary School in Sherman Oaks served as the honored host for the board’s meeting, at which board members took up the issues of school bus emissions and special education. Understandably, this excited the campus far less than when Jay Leno visits to interview Riverside’s students for “The Tonight Show.” Still, there were cookies waiting for the folks who oversee LAUSD.

“It’s not a dog-and-pony show. Although, I guess you want to put on a good show,” said Riverside’s principal, Errol Haft, whose students had gone home before the board and its entourage arrived.

The board member who pushed for the quarterly roadshows in 1999 says the meetings can be eye-openers that remind the board of its mission. When members visit each other’s districts, “I think they become aware of the varied kinds of constituencies that each of us have,” Valerie Fields said. As many as 1,000 people have attended the off-site meetings, far more than could fit in the 170-seat auditorium downtown.

At Riverside, more than 180 people packed the auditorium, leaving only standing room for the rest. A student’s exhibit on plant growth--complete with a beet, a carrot and a potato sprouting in water--took up its own space.

Filling wooden seats were several of the school board’s most frequent community speakers, including Howard Watts, who had figured the bus route from his Hollywood home to the San Fernando Valley school before hitching a ride with a friend.

Watts said he supports board members’ holding their meetings at schools but he didn’t like Tuesday’s location. “This is isolated,” Watts said. “I’ve never heard of this place.”

For those who could not attend, the LAUSD’s TV crew shuttled videotapes from the Valley school to the district’s downtown broadcast facility.

One board member wondered before Tuesday’s meeting whether the trips are worth the trouble of picking the site, outfitting it for the meeting and getting all the staff who must be on hand to leave their offices.

“I think sometimes, accidentally, it reminds board members about the conditions of schools or it reminds the new superintendent [Roy Romer] how lousy things can be,” said board member David Tokofsky. But the visits may not give board members an accurate impression of a school, he said.

“When the board descends upon the site, the chewing gum is usually picked up, the bathroom is usually stocked with toilet paper and the public address system begins to work,” said Tokofsky, who thinks the meetings at schools would be more effective if they focused on a single topic instead of the board’s usual laundry list of reports, expenditures and motions.

Away from its more comfortable downtown quarters, the board had to deal with chanting from picketing teacher aides outside and from a setting sun that glared in the faces of Romer and board President Genethia Hayes. Closing the auditorium’s doors eased both distractions.