Romer’s Plan for Troubled Schools OKd

Despite objections from students and faculty at some of the schools, the Los Angeles Board of Education gave tacit approval Monday to Supt. Roy Romer’s plans to restructure nine of the district’s most troubled schools.

Romer’s proposals for the campuses involve reassigning some staff members, hiring outside consultants and rearranging large schools into smaller, more personal educational programs, among other things.

Some board members, frustrated by what they saw as the slow pace of change in the nation’s second-largest district, had introduced their own proposals to improve lagging campuses. But members appeared to like what they heard Monday. They voted to withdraw the series of motions and amendments offered as alternatives to Romer’s plans, and instead asked the superintendent for a progress report on the reforms in May.

The changes at the nine campuses -- Gompers, Vernon, Horace Mann and Sun Valley middle schools, and Locke, Jefferson, Wilson, Fremont and Roosevelt high schools -- are required by federal law because the schools repeatedly failed to meet achievement goals. But Romer said before the meeting that such large-scale changes were overdue at the secondary schools.

“We should have been on this a year or two ago,” he said. “We have youngsters whose lives are passing before their eyes. We aren’t moving too fast.... This turns schools into better schools by a series of changes.”

Still, some expressed concern that the district was moving too fast and without the participation of many on campus.

“You are playing with people’s lives,” said Roosevelt’s student body president, Nina Bianca Duran. She urged Romer to delay any action until students, teachers and parents could be more engaged in discussions about how her school would be restructured. “You need to hold off on voting on further action.... Please include us as part of your solution, and not the problem.”

Teacher Kiri Baranwal, representative of United Teachers Los Angeles at Gompers Middle School, urged board members to “think about what the real solutions are and take some risks.”

Part of Romer’s plan calls for trying to recruit more qualified teachers to the school. Baranwal expressed doubt about that proposal. “I don’t know where all the excellent teachers are, waiting to come to Gompers,” she said. “That’s not a real solution.”

Baranwal refused to sign off on the district’s plan for her school. She said she worried that school officials were holding teachers responsible for “the decades of under-funding, the decades of racism and neglect.”

Also at the meeting, Romer announced that he has appointed veteran district officials to key new positions. Dan Isaacs, an official with Associated Administrators Los Angeles, will be the district’s new chief operating officer, effective July 1. Isaacs will not oversee the district’s financial and budgetary offices -- as previous COO Tim Buresh did -- but will instead concentrate on “a culture of service to individual schools,” Romer said.

Robert Collins, a local superintendent in the San Fernando Valley, will become chief of instruction for grades 7 to 12. Ronni Ephraim, the district’s current chief of instruction, will oversee instruction for grades 1 to 6.