Romer Beats Back an Ambush

At times, schools Supt. Roy Romer must feel as if he’s in the Alamo. No sooner does he quell one uprising in the sprawling, heavily Latino school district than another group of Mexicans besieges him from another direction.

That’s pretty much what happened March 12. Barely an hour after skillfully settling a long political standoff over the Belmont Learning Complex, Romer was fighting with a powerful Latino politician on another issue. Last week he beat back that ambush, too.

Romer didn’t win a couple of terms as governor of Colorado and head the Democratic National Committee without learning political survival skills. Still, “I do sometimes wonder what I got myself into here,” he said, adding that the political infighting he’s seen in the 20 months since being named chief of the nation’s second-largest school district is as rough as anything he’s ever experienced.

The defenders of the Alamo faced frontal assaults by a known enemy. Romer’s problem is that in L.A., politics is a cross-fire among several potent factions.

These factions are especially self-righteous in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They all claim to have the best interests of 700,000 young students (and 400,000 more in adult education) at heart. They include teachers unions, bureaucrats at headquarters and even paternalistic philanthropists.

But in recent years the most volatile element has been meddling politicians--most recently state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles). He’s the guy who ambushed Romer on March 12 with a proposal to spend $6.3 million on an unproven adult literacy program.

Polanco’s goal was laudable--providing more English-language instruction for immigrants. The problems began when he told Romer in a televised school board meeting that he already had the votes to approve the literacy program. Polanco had met privately with individual school board members to promote the program, called Reality Based Learning California.

Romer warned the senator that his tactics went outside the normal school district procurement process. LAUSD lawyers also said Polanco’s lobbying could be construed as a violation of state laws prohibiting private meetings of public bodies.

Despite Romer’s protestations, the school board approved the literacy program 4-3. The yes votes came from board members who either felt indebted to Polanco--an effective political fund-raiser and campaign organizer--or wanted to curry favor with him.

The stink of an already smelly deal got worse over the next few days when it was revealed that Reality Based Learning California is not affiliated with a reputable company with a similar name in Washington state but is instead a start-up firm. And its three employees just happen to work out of a Los Angeles law firm run by a longtime Polanco ally.

Little wonder that at last Tuesday’s school board meeting the erstwhile supporters of Reality Based Learning California said they had been misled, and the contract was rescinded.

The worst damage from this flap was to the reputations of the naive school board members who allowed themselves to be seduced, or cowed, by Polanco. The senator is so accustomed to controversy that he’ll likely shake off this setback and await another chance to throw his weight around the LAUSD.

In fairness, Polanco pushed his way into school district politics at the behest of Latino activists angry at the equally ham-handed meddling of Anglo politicians such as former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. It was Riordan and his political cronies who engineered the election of the current school board majority and the firing of a popular Latino superintendent, Ruben Zacarias, in 1999.

Romer had nothing to do with Zacarias’ ouster, but it haunts his own tenure. No single event did more to create the Alamo scenario Romer faces now. It gave Latino activists a reason to be angry with the district and Latino parents cause to feel alienated from it.

Romer’s push to complete the controversial Belmont project went a long way toward healing that rift. Polanco’s power play could have reopened it, but the senator arrogantly overplayed his hand. Before Polanco, or some other ambitious pol, sets another ambush for Romer, the school board chief would do well to cultivate closer ties with the only group that has the numbers to keep the other factions in the LAUSD at bay: the grass-roots Latino parents whose children are 70% of Romer’s constituency.