Costly Race in a Final Swirl

Next week’s election between Los Angeles Unified school board incumbent Caprice Young and opponent Jon Lauritzen for a San Fernando Valley constituency could be decided over seven toilets.

At least that’s what Lauritzen hopes as his campaign keeps accusing Young of spending $100,000 for construction of private bathrooms for school board members at their downtown Los Angeles offices. The expense, he says again and again in mailers and TV ads, is a prime example of financial excesses that plague the nation’s second-largest school system.

Young, the board president, wants to tout the school district’s accomplishments in raising test scores and, conceding more progress is needed, advocate her plan to break the 748,000-student district into 10 to 30 independent entities.

But the 37-year-old Studio City resident also finds herself having to tell voters that the board of education did not vote to approve or disapprove the bathroom expenditure, which was handled by a staff decision and covers the cost for all seven board members. Young said she would have voted against it if given the chance.

That issue shows the different approaches the two sides are taking to woo the modest number of voters expected to show up Tuesday in the school board’s District 3, which stretches from Studio City to the Ventura County line.

Three other incumbents on the seven-member board are also up for reelection. But the Young-Lauritzen contest is the most expensive to date, with the sides having spent more than $1.3 million combined and more to come this week.

Young, a former computer executive whose campaign is financially supported by former Mayor Richard Riordan’s and billionaire Eli Broad’s Coalition for Kids organization, has mostly stayed away from negative campaigning and focused on district breakup, a plan she insists she has been thinking about for years. Her message: Reform is taking hold, but it won’t last unless more school control is given to local neighborhoods.

Lauritzen, 64, a former schoolteacher backed by United Teachers-Los Angeles, has run a blistering ad campaign that attacks Young for not only the bathrooms, but classroom overcrowding, academic failure in the middle and high school grades and misjudgments on environmental and seismic problems that now stall the half-finished Belmont Learning Complex. The Chatsworth resident has billed himself as an outsider, with no connection to downtown powerbrokers such as Riordan and Broad.

Because both campaigns expect less than 30% of 320,600 registered voters to turn out, negative campaigning could add several hundred Lauritzen votes and make the difference between winning and losing, experts say.

“Caprice Young needs to respond quickly and forcefully to the attacks,” said Sheldon Kamieniecki, USC political science chairman. “Otherwise, people will think there is something wrong.”

To some extent, she has. Her mailers associate Lauritzen, who taught for 35 years, with the district’s past. One of her mailers, designed to look like a Lauritzen resume, lists “Running for elected office and losing” as a hobby. Lauritzen lost bids in 1996 and 2000 for an Assembly seat.

Lauritzen’s campaign material is more aggressive. One recent mailer shows a man behind bars next to a photograph of a prison latrine. While citing a recent KCBS television expose on dirty school washrooms, the mailer reads: “Even convicts get clean bathrooms ... Why can’t our kids?” The mailer also chides Young for spending “$100,000 on a private bathroom in her new $200-million district headquarters.”

Such ads are driving up the costs. As of Feb. 15, Young has spent $715,785 and Lauritzen has spent $588,324. The Coalition for Kids has given Young’s campaign $611,540 and United Teachers-Los Angeles has given Lauritzen’s campaign $613,620. The $1.3-million total cost of the race eclipses the $356,000 spent in the second most-expensive contest by four candidates in the East Los Angeles-centered District 5, a seat being defended by David Tokofsky.

Lauritzen’s campaign is being run by John Shallman, who helped school board member Marlene Canter oust incumbent Valerie Fields two years ago and Steve Cooley knock off Gil Garcetti for county district attorney in 2000. Young’s campaign is being led by Bill Carrick, who helped Riordan and James K. Hahn win mayoral races.

During a surprisingly cordial debate between Young and Lauritzen at Van Gogh Elementary School in Granada Hills on Monday, audience members expressed frustration with the negative campaigning.

“Don’t they realize this is a turnoff,” Granada Hills resident David Kaye said.

“I had to get your attention,” Lauritzen told the crowd, explaining why he used attack ads. “This election is critical. I don’t like some of the things we’ve said, but I think they needed to be said.”

Aside from saying the $100,000 bathroom mailers were misleading, Young told the crowd that Lauritzen had erroneously implied her performance as a board member received a C rating from the Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement. The education advocacy group’s interim president wrote a letter two weeks ago asking that Lauritzen stop making such claims. The grade was not a report card on individual board members, but the result of a parent survey that asked if the district was realizing students’ potential, the Alliance said.

Lauritzen said he got his information from media reports.

Young argues passionately for local autonomy, citing the need to give schools the right to determine which programs work.

Lauritzen, in general, supports keeping the school district undivided but said he is willing to look at breakup plans that improve education.