Teachers, students, others appear before board on Supt. Deasy

Before a closed-door meeting to discuss the evaluation — and the future — of schools Supt. John Deasy, the L.A. Board of Education on Tuesday heard an hour of comments from parents, teachers and others about the superintendent.

Deasy last week presented board President Richard Vladovic with an offer to leave in February but remain as a consultant until June 2015. Prior to his closed-door meeting with the board, Deasy said he was looking forward to a “good and robust opportunity for a performance appraisal and finding ways to work as a team.”

And Vladovic said the board will come together as a “family” and have a frank discussion about Deasy’s performance. “We need to come together as eight individuals that literally govern this district.”

About a dozen or so speakers urged board members to retain Deasy, crediting him with reaching out particularly to students struggling with English and poverty. Maria Brenes of InnerCity Struggle, an East L.A. community organization, said Deasy had continued the push to boost parent involvement and students’ access to college.

A parent at 24th Street Elementary thanked him, in Spanish, for coming out to a park in the rain to hear their concerns; Deasy supported their efforts this year to transform their low-performing campus with a hybrid district/charter school arrangement under the parent trigger law.

Fernando Mendez, 19, who is graduating from Locke High School this spring, said Deasy represented equity among all students in the district. While he has done well in school and will be attending college in the fall, his younger siblings have fallen below their grade levels in reading.

He said it was disheartening to hear that adults were getting “distracted by politics instead of figuring out how to help students.”

“We need real leadership and we need real solutions,” he said. ”That’s what Dr. Deasy means to me. He is a strong advocate.”

The day’s sharpest comments to the board came from Farnaz Simantob, a parent at Lanai Road Elementary in Encino and Portola Middle School in Tarzana. She chastized Vladovic and board members for dysfunction and political machinations to oust Deasy, whom she called “the most competent superintendent” in years.

“Now go to your room” and think, she told board members. That prompted board member Marguerite LaMotte to retort, “I refuse to accept this.”

Teachers spoke both for and against Deasy.

Tom Adams, a 32-year district veteran and teacher at Sylmar High School, took a personal day off from school to speak to the board. He said he appreciated Deasy’s willingness to listen to teachers and hoped to avoid another leadership change that would thwart momentum — as he said he has seen several times.

“Whenever there are bold moves in the right direction, that happens,” he said.

Lindsey Patin, a second-year special education teacher at Augustus Hawkins High School in South L.A., praised Deasy for helping reduce student suspensions. She said she disagreed with the notion that rank-and-file teachers do not like Deasy.

“I’m a teacher, I’m a union member and I support him. There is more than one voice for teachers,” she said.

But the day’s last speaker was Patrena Shankling, a substitute teacher who became widely known as the person fired on the spot by Deasy as she was teaching at Washington Preparatory High School.

Shankling told board members that Deasy had disrupted her classroom and disrespected her as he berated her day’s classroom activities during an unannounced visit in September 2011. Although she was following the regular classroom teacher’s lesson plan — setting up composition notebooks — he “scolded” her in a “tirade” over wasting instructional time, she said.

Shankling exceeded the 3-minute time limit before finishing her story but the board voted, 5 to 2, to extend it by three minutes. Monica Garcia and Tamar Galatzan voted against letting her continue her story.

Warren Fletcher, president of the 35,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles, made no direct comments about Deasy but noted that he had given board members data on teacher confidence in the superintendent’s leadership. In April, 91% percent of 17,500 members polled responded that they had “no confidence” in Deasy’s leadership.

In an interview, Fletcher quickly brought up what he called the “iPad debacle.”

This administration, he said, is “more interested in making sure that contracts are granted to favorite vendors … than making sure it’s done right… It starts looking more like the worst kind of defense contracting scandals we saw in the 1980s.”

Fletcher stopped short of calling for Deasy’s dismissal, however.

The superintendent has pushed for a $1-billion iPad program to provide every student and teacher an Apple device. The program has gotten off to a rocky start.

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Twitter: @stephenceasar @howardblume

stephen.ceasar@latimes.com

howard.blume@latimes.com