Fresno Mayor Wants Broader Power

Reviving a campaign issue he raised more than a year ago, Mayor Alan Autry says the time has come for local school board members to be appointed by him rather than elected.

The mayor’s idea has touched off strong opposition all the way to Sacramento.

Gov. Gray Davis said that he likes the mayor but that politicians who feel strongly about school issues should consider running for school boards themselves.

The California School Boards Assn., a lobbying and service organization that represents most of the state’s local school districts, also dislikes Autry’s idea.

“There’s no culture for it in California,” said Scott Plotkin, the group’s executive director. “We don’t have the tradition of a top-down East Coast big-city mayor who runs everything out here. He’s obviously bored with the job he was elected to do.”

Such comments aren’t stopping Autry, who says the election of school board members only “gives the illusion of democracy.” In fact, he says, voters rarely know anything about most candidates in school board races.

Particularly irksome to Autry is the way teachers who no longer care about their jobs--so-called burnout cases--are handled by Fresno’s elected board.

“They have a term called ‘dance of the lemons,’” he said. “It made me nauseous when I first heard it explained. Instead of firing a teacher who is burned out, they move them around from one school to another.”

The Fresno Unified School District is the fourth largest in the state, with more than 79,000 students who speak 101 languages. A fourth of the district’s students receive public assistance and a third have limited English skills.

Like those in other large urban districts, Fresno schools have had problems ranging from high dropout rates to low test scores. But officials say the district has shown improvement in recent years.

Autry hasn’t focused on any specific problem in making his case for an appointed board, although he says the district could do more to help low-performing students who often slip through the cracks.

He says the main problem is that Fresno schools are simply mired in state bureaucracy and too dependent on edicts from Sacramento. Only radical change can restore local control, he says.

Fresno school board President Michael B. O’Hare responded, “He wants to try to control everything.... He doesn’t even live in the school district.”

Describing himself as “the education mayor,” Autry first proposed that he should have the power to appoint two members of the seven-member school board to their positions, then expanded that proposal to the entire board.

Last year, Autry pushed through a new city ordinance establishing a daytime curfew during school hours for children ages 12 to 17, aimed at curbing school truancy. The school district took no position on the curfew, and some officials think that may have angered the mayor.

More than a dozen major U.S. cities have local school boards that are appointed rather than elected, Autry said. He pointed to Chicago, Boston and Baltimore.

Fresno would become the first city in California to have a school board completely appointed by the mayor. Oakland has a board of seven elected and three appointed members. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown also is considering a formal proposal that the city move to some kind of appointee system after he leaves office.

Although he admits that his effort may have little chance of succeeding, Autry said he will never drop the idea. “It’s the first soldiers on the beach who take the most lead,” he said.

Autry’s new push brought him face to face with school board members recently at a forum held by the Fresno City Council. He said the board is “entrenched with special interests and bureaucracy. You have a group bent solely on turf protection.”

Strongly opposing the appointment concept were Fresno Unified School District Supt. Santiago Wood and Fresno County Schools Supt. Pete Mehas. All but one of the city’s seven council members also oppose the idea.

After the meeting, district spokeswoman Jill Marmolejo said school officials want to work with Autry on issues of mutual concern, but oppose his proposal.

“Any time the public would lose a right to vote, it’s serious,” she said. “We believe the mayor is sincere on this, but off a little.”

“We want to work collaboratively, but it’s hard to take the suggestion that our teachers don’t care,” Marmolejo added. “Our teachers are dedicated people.”

The school board issue is one of two current controversies involving Autry. Fresno’s city attorney has asked the state Fair Political Practices Commission to advise whether the mayor may have inadvertently fostered conflicts of interest in creating a city film commission last summer.

Before Autry took office, the city’s official liaison with the movie industry was the Fresno Convention and Visitors Bureau. Autry persuaded City Council members to fund a film commission with $150,000.

A former actor, Autry is a partner in a local film-making company, Dirt Road Productions. He hired one of his Dirt Road employees to help run the commission. The city’s lawyer is asking whether that relationship should preclude Autry from being involved in decisions about films that might be made in Fresno.