LA Unified District 5 school board campaign spending tops other races
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez | KPCC | http://bit.ly/ecA1sf
March 4, 2011 | Campaign spending for L.A. Unified’s 5th School Board District race, including contributions from outside groups, has broken the $1 million mark. That’s significantly more than the three other school board campaigns are spending for Tuesday’s election.
Like a salamander, L.A. Unified’s 5th School Board District twists from Los Feliz, Eagle Rock and Mount Washington in the north, to El Sereno and East L.A. The district then curves south to the cities of Maywood, Huntington Park and South Gate.
That’s where City Councilman Bill De Witt recently hosted a candidates’ forum in the dark wood-paneled South Gate council chambers. "We have an election coming up for the open seat, District 5, the L.A. Unified Board of Education," De Witt said. "Yolie Flores decided not to run and so it’s an open seat. We have three official candidates and one write-in candidate. They’re all present with us this evening."
A handful of people showed up. De Witt said he was disappointed because parents and other concerned adults should pay attention to the L.A. Unified School Board's decisions over budgeting, contracts and student academic performance.
Longtime PTA leader Scott Folsom began the panel. Other contenders for the 5th District seat are Luis Sanchez – the chief of staff for current board member Monica Garcia, retired L.A. Unified teacher John Fernandez and L.A. Unified teacher Bennett Kayser.
Fernandez opposes balancing the schools’ budget by laying off teachers. Kayser wants less standardized testing. Folsom says improving teacher performance is the board’s most important work. Sanchez says he wants to make better schools the centerpiece of safer neighborhoods.
Mary Johnson listened intently during the one-hour panel. She lives in South Gate, and she’s helped organize parent groups to communicate their concerns to the district. "The most important issue right now is the budget, cutting of teachers and classified. Because right now they talk about teachers but we’re hurting very much in the clerical field. You can’t run the school without the clerical people also," she said.
Candidate Fernandez says his advanced degrees in education and his two-and-a-half decades as an L.A. Unified classroom teacher give him the experience to figure out an end run around those layoffs. "That’s going to have a devastating, horrendous effect on our kids, that’s basically at our kids," Fernandez said.
Bennett Kayser also wants to prevent layoffs – and to stop the proliferation of charter schools.
"I’ve seen a lot of good things in the district, and I know it can be better, it just seems that there are efforts to make money at the expense of public education," he said.
That’s not candidate Luis Sanchez’s opinion. He’s backed charters and other non-traditional schools as a school board staffer.
He says that being a new father, substitute teaching for two years and helping to establish the East L.A. education advocacy group Inner City Struggle have helped him develop the skills to become an effective board member. "I think I have this interesting perspective of being in the community as an educator and being in the board room working for school board president Monica Garcia," Sanchez said. "That’s allowed me both to understand the leverage of power that happens at the school district and how to move it. But also how to build a strong coalition to get the reforms necessary."
That understanding of power worries candidate Scott Folsom. He pulled out of the race a few months ago because of the huge sums of money he realized he’d have to raise.
Sanchez has raised the most – about $150,000 – so far. A group funded largely by philanthropist Eli Broad and others allied with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Service Employees International Union has spent more than half a million dollars so far to elect Sanchez. That amount of money, and the political clout behind it, compelled Folsom to re-enter the race as a write-in candidate.
"On the bond oversight committee we’ve been trying to keep the developers out of making government decisions for nine years," said Folsom. "For them to come in and start buying influence, perhaps, is not good."
The teachers union put its endorsement and money behind retired teacher John Fernandez, then pulled that support when the union found out Fernandez had declared personal bankruptcy and hadn’t filed two recent tax returns. Fernandez says his experience as an educator trumps those lapses.
Now, the teachers union is backing teacher Bennett Kayser; it’s spent $140,000 so far to help him win a seat on the school board. Allies of Sanchez and Kayser are spending thousands of dollars on attack-themed campaign flyers.
When that literature landed at Alisa Smith’s home in Glassell Park, it turned her off. She drove to the South Gate forum so she could hear the candidates in person.
"To me experience is really important," Smith said, "that you actually love kids is really important. And, you know, that you have a belief in the traditional school system because all of us of a certain age know that it used to work really well, it just wasn’t accessible to everyone."
She doesn’t doubt that all candidates want to restore the joy of learning to the public schools. But she adds that the harsh tone of the politicking makes it really hard to know which contender is best able to achieve that goal.
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