Juggling Jobs a Way of Life for School Trustees

As a Los Angeles school board member, Mike Lansing serves 900,000 students and helps administer a budget of $6.8 billion. That’s twice the number of people a state assemblyman represents, and more money than the gross domestic product of Ethiopia.

But technically, being a board member is part-time duty. It pays $24,000 a year. So Lansing juggles his day job -- directing two Boys & Girls clubs -- with his other day job, serving on the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Trustee David Tokofsky and board President Jose Huizar understand his dilemma. The four other trustees are retired or wealthy. Tokofsky, Huizar and Lansing are not.

But like their colleagues, the three sit through lengthy board meetings, make small-talk with parents during campus visits and perhaps scale playground equipment with kindergartners. They hand out diplomas, cut ribbons and break bread now and then with cafeteria workers.

This is not to suggest the role of school trustee is an entirely altruistic endeavor. Trustees also devote a significant amount of time to fundraising, meet-and-greets and otherwise getting reelected.

“They are still politicians,” said Jaime A. Regalado, director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A. And being on the board can lead to other elected offices.

By comparison, Los Angeles City Council members make about $130,000 a year and administer a budget that is less than half that of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles can be an expensive place to live, and even with spouses working, some past school board members have had to take out second mortgages on their homes to make ends meet.

All of which raises a question about the job status of school trustees: Which part is the part-time part?

As Lansing, Tokofsky and Huizar have discovered, being a school board member and a part of the workforce means finding an employer who is more than accommodating and a job, preferably with above-average pay, that doesn’t present too many conflicts of interest.

During his packed days, Lansing pingpongs along the 24-mile route from board headquarters downtown to the Boys & Girls clubs he oversees in Wilmington and San Pedro, where a cluttered desk dominated by a computer screen ringed by sticky notes awaits him.

A recent Tuesday was typical. Lansing began at 8:30 a.m. at the San Pedro club, discussing plans for a new gymnasium. By 10:30, he was in a closed-session school board meeting downtown. A regular board meeting began around 2. In between, he squeezed in a conference with his district staff and met with schools Supt. Roy Romer.

“All these things blend in, meld in together,” he said. “I’m just trying to remember -- who am I talking to again? It gets nuts, but it flows together pretty good.”

There are days when Lansing’s chief of staff, Broc Coward, offers to join him in the car for the trips between San Pedro and downtown L.A. “I think about how to be the body in the car to get him in the carpool lane, because it’s so bad,” Coward said.

Lansing can’t miss many meetings because state laws mandate that school board members approve every district contract worth more than $25,000, and every personnel change. Because L.A. Unified includes more than 950 K-12, adult and early education schools and has embarked on a $14-billion program to build 160 schools, the number of decisions to be made is staggering.

Then there are the meetings -- committee meetings, meetings with district staff, meetings with Romer. And, of course, official meetings of the full board, which are scheduled every two weeks but often occur weekly. These meetings, which are televised, begin near noon and stretch toward midnight with an alarming frequency.

The briefing books prepared for each board meeting are usually 3 inches thick, and often come in multiples. Tokofsky’s staff routinely ferries documents to his car in a shopping cart.

Some former and current members say that the district needs to consider ways to limit the trustees’ involvement in the day-to-day running of the school system. Others say that the district should consider lobbying for charter reform to make theirs into full-time jobs.

Board members will admit they receive some perks -- a car allowance for starters, as well as a budget for an office staff. But still, most worry that added in with the very nature of the job -- long hours, low pay and often divisive elections -- the part-time status limits who may want to be a member of the school board.

“Who do we expect to run for these positions?” asked Huizar, the board president, who is also an attorney. Huizar, 35, and his wife, Richelle Rios, the assistant director of L.A.’s Commission for Children, Youth and Their Families, have one young daughter, with another on the way.

“Not too many people are willing to make that sacrifice,” he said.

The idea of a part-time school board, said Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian emeritus, is a holdover from the Progressive Era, when Americans believed that education should be exempt from politics. The Progressives made panels such as school boards and port authorities part-time to “buffer these entities from day-to-day politics,” Starr said.

Such a buffer doesn’t exist today.

Unlike other elections, there are no campaign finance limits on school board races. And in L.A. Unified, elections mean big money. For example, United Teachers Los Angeles gave $1.4 million to four candidates in the last school board election; the rival Coalition for Kids gave $1.1 million to four candidates as well.

This all calls for politicking. “They have to have the time to run campaigns,” Regalado, the government expert, said of trustees. “That also whittles away at your part-time nature.”

The tension between part-time status and full-time work presents a fundamental contradiction, Starr said, because the Los Angeles school board, like most others, is elected rather than appointed, as in New York.

And the fact that board members must work means that their other jobs become political fodder as well. “In our interconnected society, it’s theoretically impossible for anyone to be on the Los Angeles Board of Education and be working for a living and not have multiple conflicts,” Starr said.

Indeed, Tokofsky, 44, was a teacher at Marshall High School in Los Angeles when he first won election to the board in 1995. But because board members are not allowed to work directly for the district, he had to give up that position, which paid about $65,000 a year. Some teachers who began in the district at the same time as Tokofsky are now making $85,000 a year.

Since then, Tokofsky has hop-scotched around -- consulting for foundations and unions. Now, Tokofsky -- whose wife, Tara Neuwirth, runs the English as a second language division of UCLA Extension -- works as a master teacher for Green Dot Public Schools, a charter company that partly operates within L.A. Unified. He helps to train and mentor young teachers and aids in curriculum development.

Other board members face similar problems.

“It’s hard to find a job that does no business with the school district,” said former board President Caprice Young, who quit her job at IBM after taking office because the L.A. school district had contracts with her company. “I couldn’t be a checker at Staples; I couldn’t work for Pizza Hut. Everybody does something with the school district.”

Some members recuse themselves from certain board discussions and decisions -- Tokofsky when Green Dot is involved, Lansing when any one of the more than two dozen Southern California Boys & Girls clubs is doing business with the district.

Huizar resigned from a corporate law firm when elected in 1999 because the company did a sizable amount of business with the district. He then worked as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles -- a job that brought its own occasional conflicts -- before joining a Pasadena law firm last year.

Lansing, a widower, said that he may be too busy to run for reelection when his four-year term is up in 2007.

“I have quite a bit of responsibility here,” Lansing, 48, said of his job at the Boys & Girls clubs. “And I’ve got to make sure I can do all of my fundraising and administrative duties here. That takes a lot of time. So, it will be tough for me to consider running again, given that reality.”

The result: board members multi-task like mad.

Tokofsky, the father of two young girls, has developed his own rituals. Almost every night, after he and his wife put their daughters to bed, he goes out for what he calls “8:45s” -- evening meetings with constituents and others seeking his ear. He heads out to a local Eagle Rock eatery -- he’s partial to Camilo’s, Casa Bianca and Swork -- where, as he describes it, he “holds court” for several hours.

The fluid schedule by which Huizar, as board president, must abide requires regularly interrupting family and personal time.

Huizar’s school board work, said his chief of staff, Monica Garcia, “is the dominating force in his life because of the magnitude of it. He asks for tolerance and support of those around him so he can do this.”

On recent vacations, Huizar was consistently interrupted by phone calls about board business. Garcia woke him up in Tokyo at 3 a.m. to answer questions from a reporter.

Once, when the Huizar family arrived back in Los Angeles from Mexico, Garcia picked up the family at the airport and drove him to the office for a 9 p.m. staff meeting. It lasted past midnight.

“Every relationship, every marriage has its challenges,” said Rios, Huizar’s wife. “We just tend to have more.”

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ponders whether to call a special election next year to ask voters to convert the Legislature to part-time status, the issues confronted by L.A. school board members may be helpful.

The pay, said former board member Mark Slavkin, “is part of a syndrome of devaluing public service.... That’s a little worrisome. We want it both ways. We want brilliant people solving all the problems, but we don’t want to pay people decently.”

Over the next year, Huizar hopes to tackle issues of school board governance and examine ways that board members can streamline their schedule -- or, perhaps, lobby for more pay.

It’s too soon to know whether they’ll have the time to get to it.