Board Votes to Begin Zacarias Buyout Talks

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Thursday took the first step toward ousting Supt. Ruben Zacarias when it voted to begin negotiations on terminating his contract.

Emerging from a 2 1/2-hour closed session to shouts of “Ruben! Ruben!” from an angry crowd, the board announced the 4-3 vote authorizing its attorney to contact Zacarias’ attorney with a buyout offer. The board attorney, Richard Sheehan, will decide how much to offer on the remaining 20 months of Zacarias’ contract.

Zacarias and his attorney, Joseph F. Coyne Jr., both retorted, however, that they would find any buyout unacceptable and expect to contest the board’s action next week.

“We don’t like it,” Coyne said. “We don’t want a buyout. Our goal here is for Ruben Zacarias to remain superintendent.”

Despite attempts by supportive board members to derail his removal, the majority’s decision leaves Zacarias no choice but to leave. He and his attorney can now only negotiate terms of the buyout package.

Board member Valerie Fields said she hopes that Zacarias will retire and leave the district with the “dignity and respect he wishes.”

“Nobody is happy,” Fields said. “We are all unhappy to be at this place.”

The board made no announcement concerning a fill-in for Zacarias. But sources said Ramon C. Cortines, a former superintendent in New York, Pasadena and San Francisco, was the top candidate to become acting superintendent and lead the district through the selection of a permanent replacement for the 70-year-old Zacarias.

Board members said afterward that they would make no appointment until there is a vacancy.

Cortines, who comes with a reputation of being able to negotiate treacherous political situations, would reportedly work jointly with Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller to reorganize the district administration.

Reached Thursday evening at a ranch he owns near Porterville, Calif., Cortines said he’d had “a lot of conversation” with Los Angeles board members about how he might help the district cope with its management crisis.

The way it was left, he said, was that the board “would get back to me. They said they have to worry about Dr. Zacarias first.”

The imminent arrival of a new administration with a mission to shake up management caused a stir of speculation Thursday about an exodus of Zacarias loyalists, including the district’s top deputies.

The board touched off a leadership crisis earlier this month by appointing Miller chief executive with direct authority over all district staff, a move Zacarias called unacceptable. The board’s compromise offer to change the title to chief operating officer did not mollify the superintendent or his supporters.

The speed of the initial appointment, in closed session, angered Zacarias and his supporters, who accused the board of failing to follow due process and violating his contract, which names him as the district’s chief executive officer.

In response, the board called Thursday’s meeting to take public comment on a proposal to reaffirm Miller’s appointment as chief operating officer, a title that members said more closely matched Miller’s duties. The move to begin buyout negotiations was later added to the agenda.

Before the initial open meeting Thursday, a crowd of mostly Latino protesters gathered amid heavy security outside district headquarters blowing plastic whistles. They marched in a circle waving placards that said, “Ruben, Si, Miller, No!” and “Respeto Ahora!” (Respect Now!).

School police monitoring the door to the boardroom asked them to leave both the whistles and any political messages outside.

Even as this raucous parade was underway, early speakers--mostly Latino parents--expressed their feelings before the stern-faced board. They seemed to be evenly split between those who supported the new board and those who were threatening to launch recalls of newly elected board members.

“We support your designation of a CEO who can start to clean up this administration for the benefit of our children,” Lucia Perez said.

But Luis Carillo declared, “Caprice Young, Valerie Fields, Genethia Hayes and Mike Lansing, you committed a fraud when you ran for election because you never told us of your intentions to get rid of Dr. Zacarias. Mr. Miller, I ask you to resign. Do not be a part of this vigilante action.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund both handed out statements demanding that the board rescind its appointment of Miller. MALDEF’s chief counsel, Antonia Hernandez, blasted the board for its “disregard for due process and lack of respect to the Latino community.”

“We cannot participate in a process that continues to be unlawful and unfair and an injustice,” Hernandez said.

Three board members who originally opposed Miller’s appointment as chief executive tried again Thursday to either derail or stall the vote reaffirming him.

Julie Korenstein proposed reducing Miller’s scope to facilities operations, and David Tokofsky pleaded for a two-week delay. Victoria Castro, Zacarias’ most constant supporter, joined both in losing 4-3 votes as the majority held its ground.

Three and a half hours before the board meeting, Zacarias and his attorney, Coyne, made a last-ditch effort to forestall the decision by threatening a lawsuit.

“The board trampled on the Education Code and their own contractual obligations,” Coyne said, standing beside Zacarias in a mock-trial courtroom in his downtown office. “They will not be allowed to trample on this good person. . . . We’ll see them in court next week.”

Coyne said several civil rights groups would join the suit, but he declined to name them.

The case would be based on their assertion that the board cannot legally terminate Zacarias without properly evaluating him.

“Had they sat down with the man, established goals and objectives and measured against them that he had failed in their view, Dr. Zacarias would have been the first to say the process was correct,” Coyne said.

“If the board establishes Ruben’s goals and objectives correctly, then it may be a whole different issue,” Coyne said.

Zacarias received two annual evaluations from the previous board, but his contract also calls for quarterly evaluations. The new board, which took office July 1, has drawn up a list of goals and objectives, which are meant to be the basis for an evaluation. But it has not completed its first quarterly evaluation, which is now a month late.

Zacarias has said he doesn’t think it is fair to be held to standards that were not in place when the quarter began, and said he has not even agreed to them.

He also said Thursday that he believes the board has asked him to commit an illegal act by recognizing Miller as chief executive.

“The question is, ‘Who’s the boss?’ ” Zacarias said. “You can’t have the district running on two tracks.”

He insisted that “there’s a place for Mr. Miller, but there can only be one CEO in this district. Changing one letter in his title is not a resolution.”

Zacarias concluded the news conference on a plaintive personal note.

“I feel for my daughters, but it comes with the job,” he said. “Some days I get kudos. Some days I get knocked. My model has always been Harry Truman. What’d he say? ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ I like being in the kitchen.”

Meanwhile, the growing acceptance of the board’s determination to stand behind Miller had caused a wave of apprehension among senior deputies, some of whom began to consider leaving the district.

“I can retire in six months, but I don’t know if I will,” said Ronald Prescott, deputy superintendent for government relations. “I haven’t made hard plans one way or the other.”

Francis Nakano, deputy superintendent for operations, said he is preparing for early retirement.

A high-level district manager who declined to be identified said that many former district employees who have left in frustration have indicated they might like to return to participate in a reorganization.

“Everybody anticipates major reshuffling,” he said. “There are many individual able younger people ready to fill top-level positions.”

The crisis at the district has been building since last spring’s vitriolic election in which a slate of reform candidates--Hayes, Lansing and Young--backed by Mayor Richard Riordan swept into office with an avowed intention of shaking up a stodgy bureaucracy.

Four months of almost continuous turmoil over environmental problems at the Belmont Learning Complex kept the new board from engaging in its instructional agenda.

Growing concerns that the district’s school building program was moving too slowly to capture nearly $1 billion in state bond money fueled the board’s frustration.

The school building problems culminated in the board’s Sept. 21 decision to appoint Miller to a new position of facilities reform executive, a move that turned out to be the precursor to Zacarias’ removal.

After only three weeks in office, Miller formed an alliance with the district’s environmental attorney, Barry Groveman, who was raising questions internally about the district’s unhesitating pursuit of land for two new South Gate schools even though the site was far more polluted than Belmont’s.

On Oct. 10, Hayes and board member Fields attended a meeting at which Miller and Groveman grilled top district staff on the South Gate situation.

Both came to the conclusion that district management was out of control.

Two days later, board members Lansing and Young joined them in naming Miller chief executive officer over all district staff, cutting Zacarias’ direct authority over his top deputies.

Zacarias refused to accept the diminished role, setting up a stalemate that persisted until Thursday.

A coalition of Latino elected officials and civil rights groups that had played a key role in gaining Zacarias’ 1997 appointment protested the Miller appointment as a thinly disguised coup orchestrated by Riordan to gain control over the district contracting process for his wealthy business friends.

But, in a background of widening public discontent with the school system, neither a series of rallies nor political arm-twisting could regain the momentum that had swept Zacarias into the top job 28 months earlier.

*

Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin contributed to this story.

* ZACARIAS BACKING WEAK

Poll finds overall support for schools chief Ruben Zacarias is weak, even among Latinos. A27