L.A. Teachers Union Chief Pressures Supt. Romer to Dissolve Subdistricts

One year after a slate of candidates backed by the teachers union forged a new majority on the Los Angeles Board of Education, United Teachers-Los Angeles and its scrappy president are making their political muscle strongly felt and are increasingly clashing with district Supt. Roy Romer.

Turning up the pressure in recent weeks with marches, speeches and lobbying of school board members, the union and its president, John Perez, are pushing to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District’s system of 11 administrative subdistricts.

Perez seems headed for at least a partial victory on the issue. A majority on the seven-member school board -- five of whom were elected with at least some financial support from UTLA -- has voiced support for reductions in that area. Though insisting that the 11 geographic units are needed, Romer is now offering backup plans that would cut the number to six, seven or eight.

Perez, a former government teacher who won the union presidency in 2002 by a narrow margin, calls district administrators “fat cats” and “six-figured bureaucrats” at public meetings. He talks about the school bureaucracy’s “rapacious appetite” and labels the local districts “the worst example of LAUSD waste and misplaced priorities.”

In an interview last week, he made no apologies for what he says is his increased activism. His goal, he said, is to do all he can to protect the 45,000 teachers and other staffers he represents and their classrooms. Though teachers have not been laid off, the nearly $500 million in trims this year from the district’s $5.7-billion operating fund have made teaching more difficult by cutting into support services and supplies, he said.

“In a political world, if you do nothing, you get squashed. We have to play within the political system,” said Perez, who is running for reelection next year.

Using inflammatory language is sometimes necessary, he said. “Do I plead? Absolutely, I do. It’s in the nature of the political process.”

But others question his tactics and the union’s influence over the board’s decisions. They fear that tense relations between Romer and Perez are spilling into already tough negotiations over health benefits and other contract issues.

Perez “does all the political stuff ... but he has created a situation where you can’t get anything done,” said Nancy Brown, a teacher who ran the campaign of Perez’s chief competitor for union president, Becki Robinson.

For Perez, the subdistricts symbolize misplaced priorities and “all the pressures that have been put on teachers.”

However, Romer said Perez’s campaign against the subdistricts was “about as irresponsible an act as I can imagine,” with “potentially tragic” consequences. He believes such a sudden, drastic overhaul would threaten the academic gains the district has made in the last few years and disrupt its $14-billion school construction program.

Designed to bring services closer to campuses, each subdistrict oversees 59,000 to 80,000 students. For each local district eliminated, L.A. Unified would save only about $2 million to $2.25 million in operating costs, Romer estimated. UTLA officials say the figure would probably be higher, in part because they believe many employees would retire rather than accept new, sometimes lower-paying, assignments at schools.

The subdistricts employ 987 of the district’s roughly 75,000 employees, according to L.A. Unified officials.

The union recently sent its members a flier that portrayed Romer as trying to keep bureaucracy at the expense of teachers. In an interview last week, the superintendent called the flier “pure intimidation.”

But otherwise, he declined to discuss Perez’s tactics.

“I am desperately trying to solve problems for this district, and this involves negotiating with the union,” Romer said. “A fundamental problem is that school board members are elected, so they are dependent on campaign money. I am trying not to get into that at this time.”

The balance of power on the board has changed dramatically twice in the last five years.

In 1999, the Coalition for Kids, a civic organization supported by then-Mayor Richard Riordan and billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad spent nearly $2 million to get a reform slate elected. That altered the balance of power, removed some of the teachers union’s sway and led to Romer’s hiring in 2000.

But in last year’s election, a resurgent UTLA gave about $1.4 million to candidates in board races, compared to the $1.1 million spend by the coalition. Three UTLA-backed candidates -- Jon Lauritzen, Marguerite Poindexter-LaMotte and David Tokofsky -- defeated coalition-backed opponents. They joined member Julie Korenstein in the majority of union-backed votes.

Perez then pushed for Jose Huizar -- who had received backing from both UTLA and the coalition when he was elected to the board in 2001 -- to become president.

According to several board members, the union head now meets or talks regularly with the board members that the union backed. (All of the board members except Poindexter-LaMotte, who was unavailable, were interviewed for this article.)

Perez calls his frequent interaction with board members “people of like minds banding together.”

Lauritzen said he saw Perez “a couple of times a week,” sometimes on social occasions and sometimes on business. “He is not afraid to call and give me his opinion.

“I don’t make decisions based on what the unions have to say,” Lauritzen said. “But when they give me an opinion, I give it maybe more than a little weight than the other areas, just from past history.”

Board member Marlene Canter, who was not backed by the union, said UTLA had become more active behind the scenes, and that had caused more tension. “It is distressing to see that, when there is so much on the table to be united about,” she said.

Some board members say they have seen UTLA leaders passing notes to the dais when the board is considering issues important to the union. “UTLA is controlling the puppet strings on these board members,” said trustee Mike Lansing, who was supported by the Coalition for Kids in his reelection last year.

In recent weeks, Lansing has become increasingly critical of Perez. At one meeting, the trustee sarcastically suggested that the board simply replace Romer with Perez. “I can’t speak for the superintendent,” Lansing said in an interview, “but I think it must be really tough.”

The union, he said, should “definitely have influence.” But he said the extent of that influence has become too strong.

After Tokofsky voted to postpone a vote on Lauritzen’s initial motion to dismantle the local districts altogether, the union urged its members in the same flier that criticized Romer to contact Tokofsky and pack upcoming meetings.

That flier, Tokofsky said, contained “brash manipulations of the truth.” The union, he said, made it seem, incorrectly, that he was blindly supporting the local districts. In fact, he said, he is interested in changing the district’s top-down approach to management, no matter how many subdistricts there are. “That could be in none, or four or six or 11,” he said.

Perez said the union sent the flier in response to members who were upset about Tokofsky’s vote. “Should I remain deaf, dumb and blind” to members’ complaints, he asked.

Darry Sragow, a Democratic political consultant who has managed three successful bond measure campaigns for the district, said union efforts to affect policy didn’t always succeed.

“I know people are cynical about this, but it has been my experience that once you are in office, no matter which interest group helped get you there, you are going to have to thread your way through competing arguments ... or risk being blamed by voters if you make the wrong choice,” he said.

In the months ahead, he said, both Romer and Perez will be vocal.

“Here you’ve got two very tough, strong-willed leaders, and they’ll both press hard on the school board members,” Sragow said.