Brewer fills key L.A. school district posts

Nearly a year after being hired to run the Los Angeles public school system, Supt. David L. Brewer filled some key cabinet-level posts this week and added to the stable of outside consultants trying to fix a faulty payroll system that has underpaid and overpaid thousands of employees.

To find the district’s chief financial officer, Brewer, a retired Navy admiral, tapped the financial manager of the Navy’s postgraduate college. Brewer’s choice for chief technology officer, meanwhile, currently holds the same job in the Los Angeles Community College District, where he helped address a payroll debacle similar to the one facing the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The moves, Brewer said, “are extremely important. To find the right people, sometimes you have to be a little patient.”

The district’s elected Board of Education approved the two hires at a closed session Tuesday. But the board resisted approving the person Brewer wants as the head of lobbying, legislative, public relations and parent outreach because of questions about his qualifications. The board previously declined to give two other top deputies the two-year contracts that Brewer wanted.

Brewer has yet to bring on a chief academic officer, a position he has characterized as crucial because he has no previous experience in public education. Months ago, negotiations with a veteran educator from Philadelphia fell apart over salary demands, highlighting the difficulty Brewer said he is having persuading qualified people to consider high-stress jobs in high-cost Los Angeles.

Brewer said in an interview Thursday that he expects the search for the top academic advisor to go on for two or three more months. Also needing to be filled are the chief academic slots for the elementary and high school divisions and a new middle school division. Interim appointments are serving in other key positions.

The superintendent’s pace in assembling an executive team has worried city leaders and school board members.

“Right now there are too many holes,” said board member Richard Vladovic. “I’m very happy he’s getting his team together, but I wish the pace were faster.”

Board members are responsible for some of the delay.

Brewer has hesitated in recent weeks to take candidates for board approval in the face of resistance to some of his choices, several district sources said. One concern was the lack of Latino candidates, especially those with a background in the field of English-language learners in a district that is nearly three-quarters Latino. Brewer downplayed any talk of a rift.

The new chief financial officer is former Navy financial manager Megan K. Reilly, who was given a two-year contract at $222,000 annually. Reilly, 42, is the latest in a string of naval officers to make their way to L.A. Unified. Aside from Brewer, former Navy engineers have run the district’s $20-billion school construction and modernization effort over the last seven years.

The executive director of business services and comptroller at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Reilly oversees an operating budget of $280 million and about $1 billion worth of accounts.

Tony Tortorice, 55, will leave his job at the community college district to take over technology matters. He received a two-year offer that will pay nearly $213,000 a year.

Tortorice will oversee efforts to fix a computerized payroll system plagued by intractable problems since its launch early this year. Tortorice joined the community college district in 2002, shortly after it had purchased a similar payroll system.

In contrast to L.A. Unified’s ill-fated decision to rush ahead with the new technology, Tortorice said he imposed a six-month delay when problems arose during test runs. Despite the extra time, the new system was still hampered for more than a year, and Tortorice oversaw a scramble similar to the one underway at L.A. Unified to make technical repairs and improve training.

Tortorice said he and his colleagues largely anticipated the problems and put in place a response plan for employees who received incorrect paychecks before turning on the new system. L.A. Unified was unprepared to handle the flood of furious employees who received incorrect checks.

Brewer said he went after Tortorice precisely because of his previous experiences, saying, “You want somebody who has been through the war, and he has.”

Tortorice was hired the same week that board members raised questions about the small army of technical and human relations consultants brought on to help the district’s under-qualified staff remedy the payroll crisis. During an open session at Tuesday’s meeting, member Tamar Galatzan expressed deep concern over Brewer’s request that the board approve payment of up to $585,000 for two more consultants, who together charge more than $43,000 each month.

“I would hate to come to January and for us to still have a broken system and have been paying all this money,” Galatzan said.

Brewer’s team also includes two top hires from within the district, for whom Brewer failed to win two-year contracts. Ronni Ephraim, 56, an instructional officer who oversaw the substantial rise in L.A. Unified’s elementary school test scores, will now oversee the training of all employees, a position Brewer has cited as crucial. She will earn $225,000. His other internal promotion went to Julie Slayton, 41, who will lead accountability and strategic planning efforts. She had been Brewer’s assistant chief staff and has an extensive background in program evaluation inside and outside the school system. She will earn about $145,000.

Both Ephraim and Slayton received contracts that expire at the end of June 2008.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

howard.blume@latimes.com