School Election Races : In Covina : Dispute Splits Charter Oak

COVINA —  Charter Oak High School stands in the middle of the Charter Oak Unified School District. But the school’s location divides more than this district of predominantly middle-class residents.

A controversial reorganization plan that made Charter Oak the only high school in the district has become one of the key issues in hotly contested races among nine candidates seeking two seats on the district’s board of directors. Seven candidates are vying for one four-year term and two others are seeking to fill an unexpired term.

Adding spice to the race is a board deadlocked over the reorganization plan and a recall election slated for early next year against two board members who are opposed by a citizens group fighting the plan. The group has submitted enough petition signatures to qualify a recall election Jan. 21 against school board directors Ann Hall and Carol Cherry, who back the plan.

“For a little community, we’ve had a lot of politics,” said candidate Charles H. Subject, the father of one child who attends a district school.

The reorganization plan, a source of controversy for two years, was implemented last month. It consolidated the district’s two high schools at the Charter Oak campus and converted Royal Oak High School on the south side of the district into a junior high. The plan also consolidated the district’s two junior highs on the Royal Oak campus by closing Ruddock and Sunflower intermediate schools. The district is earning money by leasing all or portions of the former junior high schools.

Support for the plan has come from candidates Kathy De Petro, Joseph Probst, John A. Rose and Subject. Although they have voiced some concerns about the plan’s implementation, they say that it must be accepted and made to work because any attempt to reverse it would be divisive and disruptive.

The plan’s most vocal opponents have been incumbent Ralph E. Bristol, who is seeking his third term, Tony Garcia and Ram C. Mukherji. Safety is also a key issue for these candidates, who have been endorsed by Concerned Citizens of the Charter Oak Unified School District, which opposes reorganization.

To handle increased enrollment at Charter Oak, a former elementary school across the street was annexed to the high school. Some candidates say the expansion has created a safety problem because students must cross Cypress Street, which they claim carries an excessive amount of traffic. Proof of the danger, they say, came earlier this month when a crossing guard suffered minor injuries when she was hit by a car that was driven through a crowd of students.

Subject disagrees, contending that Cypress Street has no more traffic than the other streets around Charter Oak and therefore is no more dangerous. And school officials have said they have made the crossing safer by changing the route students take to get between the two campuses.

Most of the controversy has centered on the reorganization plan.

In one race, candidates De Petro, Garcia, Rose, Subject, Jenward Lao and Sheila Walsten are running against incumbent Bristol for one seat on the board.

In the second race, Mukherji is running against Probst for the seat left vacant by the death in January of former board member Roscoe J. Vaniman.

Rose, 37, said he believes reorganization is inevitable, but has criticized what he considers the unprofessional and arrogant way in which the school closures were implemented and explained to residents. Rose, the director of Covina’s Masonic Home for Children, stressed his management and fund-raising experience as qualifications for the post.

Subject, Probst and De Petro have emphasized the need to heal the wounds left by the school closures. They also say that parents, teachers and students must rally behind an effort to slove the district’s budget problems and reach accord with the teachers, who have been working without a contract since July.

Underlying the dispute over reorganization is one issue most candidates are reluctant to talk about, a perceived split within the district based more on class distinctions than the plan’s educational merits. According to some residents, parents from the city’s wealthier southern section opposed reorganization because their children, who used to attend Royal Oak, must now go to Charter Oak.

Subject, 44, a former district school board president who works as a resource specialist at Gladstone High School in Azusa, believes that a north-south issue does exist.

He said that most of the resistance to the closure of Royal Oak has come from southside parents who “felt their school was scholastically above Charter Oak. So when the school closed, they felt they were not receiving the same academic help as before.” He said that these concerns have turned Cypress Street, which divides the Charter Oak campus, into the district’s “Mason-Dixon” line.

“This is not a north-south war,” said De Petro, 44, a legal transcriber who lives on the southside and has one child, who attends a district school. “There are a lot of people here that are happy with the plan. The complaints you are hearing are from a small, select group” that cannot accept change, she said.

Bristol, Garcia and Mukherji do not believe that a north-south issue exists. However, they contend that the reorganization plan is not working.

Based on their own informal survey of course offerings, they say closing Royal Oak as a high school has resulted in fewer college preparatory and technical courses at Charter Oak than were available at the other school. They also say that converting Royal Oak into a junior high school has caused overcrowding at Charter Oak.

Bristol, 51, a Rio Hondo College professor and the father of two children attending district schools, said that since the consolidation this fall, 119 classes at Charter Oak had between 35 and 45 students, compared to 60 classes averaging 35 students or more at both high schools last year.

Subject said, however, that the student-teacher ratio had not changed under reorganization, nor had course offerings. Charter Oak Principal Jack Cline contended that bringing the two schools together has actually increased the number of course offerings.

If certain courses have not been offered at Charter Oak, said Cline, it is because not enough students signed up for them. He added that although some classes may be crowded, the average student-teacher ratio at Charter Oak is 32 to 1.

Garcia and Bristol agreed with most of the other candidates that reopening Royal Oak or making it the district’s only high school is unrealistic. But Garcia, a 44-year-old counselor at Azusa High School and the father of one child who attends a district school, said the purported danger of crossing Cypress Street and the nuisance of long, wet and muddy walks between Charter Oak’s two campuses this winter could be eliminated by installing temporary classrooms on the main campus north of Cypress.

But since five years of deficit spending have left the district with a budget reserve of only $75,000, the use of temporary classrooms may not be feasible, said Supt. Michael Caston. A reserve fund of $510,000, or 3% of the district’s $17-million budget for this year, would be a prudent financial cushion for a district of Charter Oak’s size, said Caston.

Mukherji, 44, a senior engineer with Southern California Edison Co. and father of two children who attend district schools, said he is withholding any long-term commitment to Charter Oak as the district’s only high school until he re-evaluates the cost benefits. But as a believer in neighborhood schools, he said, he has not ruled out dismantling the reorganization plan at the junior high school or elementary levels if elected.

Nearly all the candidates agree that teacher morale is low.

Probst, 40, a Pasadena City College professor and the father of two children attending district schools, views teacher morale as the most important election issue. He said teacher salaries must be competitive to stop young teachers from being lured away by private-sector jobs. According to a county survey, the $18,586 first-year salary for Charter Oak teachers without experience ranked 33rd out of 43 districts in the county.

“But it’s not just a matter of money,” said Probst. “The present board has a 1920s view of conducting labor negotiations,” he said of contract talks that began in March. “To them it’s totally win or lose, instead of a family trying to resolve a problem.”

To Rose, the board’s handling of contract negotiations is just one of several symptoms of unprofessional management. Rose said the board’s appointment of Probst to fill the vacancy left when former board member Maurice Flora resigned last year was improper and an “embarrassing” example of misinformed leadership.

School officials said that they were notified by attorneys for the county that the board’s Sept. 13, 1984, appointment of Probst was invalid because it was not made within the 30-day deadline required by law. Flora resigned on Aug. 3 because he had moved out the district.

“I was appointed, then disappointed,” said Probst, explaining that the board removed him from his post on Sept. 25, only 12 days after he had been selected to serve. “I had proved myself capable and then my seat was wrenched away from me in a nasty manner.”

A first step toward handling the district’s fiscal problems, said De Petro and Garcia, would be to modernize what they called an obscure and antiquated budget. Subject and Mukherji said they would call for an independent audit of the district’s budget to regain the trust of teachers and parents who complain that the board has not been forthcoming about its finances.

Bristol said the district must reorder its priorities in favor of raising teacher salaries and expenditures that directly benefit students. Rose said he would try to solve the district’s financial problems by placing state lottery funds in an endowment fund from which money for building maintenance would be disbursed. This would ensure a steady source of yearly funding, he said.

Jenward Lao, 32, a printer, said he has no position on the reorganization plan. “I’ve really got to study (the plan) before I can say what the issues are,” said Lao. If elected, he would investigate parent complaints of drug use in district schools, he said.

Lao, who favors teaching fundamentals, said he wants to return education in the district “to the good old days” he remembers as student in the Philippines. “My school was run by Americans. That’s where I had early exposure to conservative Americans. I respect their values.”

Despite repeated attempts to reach her, candidate Sheila M. Walsten, a customer service representative, could not be reached for comment.