Board Withdraws Adult Literacy Contract

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday voted to withdraw from a controversial $6.3-million adult literacy program that had been advocated by state Senate Majority Leader Richard Polanco.

The reversal came after school board members learned that the program was not the one they thought they had approved, that its Internet lessons for immigrants were not yet developed and that it was located in the law office of a close friend of Polanco, J. Arnaldo Beltran.

Board member Genethia Hayes, who originally proposed that the district adopt the program a week ago, made the motion to quash the spending Tuesday.

She said she had thought last week that the district was hiring a Redmond, Wash., firm she visited, not the spinoff represented by Beltran.

“This is a different company and a different product that I saw when I went to Washington,” Hayes said. “This is a new company and a product I haven’t seen.”

The program passed 4 to 3 last week, but only one vote switch was needed to kill it, and that was provided by Hayes.

After the meeting Tuesday, the rest of the board said they supported her action.

The three other board members who voted to hire Reality Based Learning--Jose Huizar, Julie Korenstein and David Tokofsky--also expressed regret that they had originally approved the measure.

“Obviously, we were misled,” Huizar said. “We’ve learned from this mistake that we have to do a thorough analysis of the companies that we deal with.”

Supt. Roy Romer, angered by what he saw as Polanco’s inappropriate interference with school board issues, strongly opposed the program and urged that it be dropped.

Romer has said that Polanco misled the board by not divulging that there are actually two Reality Based Learning companies--one based in Washington state, the other in Los Angeles. The Washington company has 30 employees and child literacy software being used by 40,000 schoolchildren in Seattle and Canada. The Los Angeles-based firm has three employees, no finished product and until Tuesday had only one customer--L.A. Unified.

Polanco, reached at another meeting in Los Angeles on Tuesday, declined to comment about the school board action or his role in lobbying for the firm. He previously denied any wrongdoing and said he was only advocating for his many English-learning constituents. He said that he knew there were two separate companies and that he had no intention of misleading anyone.

Both companies were founded by Gary Andersen, but he has left the Washington firm and has been running the California company since October.

Beltran was listed as the registered agent of Reality Based Learning California, but in a phone interview Tuesday, he said he has severed his ties with the firm.

The board’s original vote for the program came despite warnings from a district lawyer who said that Polanco’s “serial meetings” with individual school trustees violated California’s public meeting law.

During last week’s heated exchange with Romer at the school board meeting, Polanco detailed how he had lobbied board members for a year to persuade them to adopt the Reality Based Learning program.

That admission kicked off an investigation by the district inspector general into possible violations of the state’s public meeting laws.

Polanco said he has not violated any such laws.

Hayes said that Polanco is being unfairly targeted by the criticism and blamed Andersen for not telling her that he had spun off an entirely new company. Hayes said she also blamed herself for not being more wary of the deal.

Andersen said Tuesday that he had told Hayes about the new endeavor and said he was disappointed that his literacy program “seemed destined for failure.”

Board members and district staff who had opposed the plan all along said they felt vindicated by Tuesday’s reversal and still seemed stunned by the bravado Polanco displayed a week ago.

“I thought that Sen. Polanco was very heavy-handed,” said board member Marlene Canter, who voted against the measure last week. “I was disappointed that we voted against the superintendent when he had done a very thorough review and had sent staff to look at that program.

“It was a political embarrassment to me that he [Polanco] would come here and speak to us, to our superintendent, in that manner.”

Huizar said that the episode might have a happy ending, however, if the board pays more attention to the issues raised by Reality Based Learning.

“If anything good comes out of this, it is that we’re talking about addressing adult literacy problems.”