Delone, Boudreaux Close in Race for Walters’ Seat on School Board : Education: Kenneth S. Washington has a slight lead in the race for the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

Elementary school Principal Barbara Boudreaux narrowly led teacher Sterling Delone in a tight race for an open seat on the Los Angeles Board of Education, early returns in Tuesday’s balloting showed.

In the contest for Office No. 5 of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, retired college administrator Kenneth S. Washington was running slightly ahead of West Hollywood City Councilman Paul Koretz, but Koretz was closing in on him as the night wore on.

“I’ve said all along this may be decided by one percentage point,” Koretz said during the ballot count.

“We ran an aggressive campaign, some say the most aggressive ever in the history of the community college district,” added Koretz, who was backed by the district’s most influential employees union and who had endorsements from nearly 100 political leaders and civic groups.

In the community college race, Washington drew on his college administrative experience and longtime ties to Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods. He also counted on three hotly contested Los Angeles City Council races in those areas to boost voter turnout and his own chances.

In the 1st District school board race, absentee ballots initially gave Boudreaux a 16-percentage point lead over Delone, but as the ballot count proceeded, he slowly narrowed the gap. The area stretches from South-Central Los Angeles west to View Park, Windsor Hills and the Crenshaw district.

But the closeness of the vote and Delone’s inability to overcome Boudreaux’s lead early on surprised both camps.

“We’re holding tight. We’re very encouraged and we think we’re going to win,” a nervous Boudreaux said from her campaign headquarters Tuesday night.

Delone noted that Boudreaux had done well with absentee voters in the April primary, but that he had surpassed her when all ballots were counted. His success in the primary was widely attributed to all-out support from the teachers union.

“I’m encouraged by the trend, but I’m so practical that it is not until I take the lead that I’ll feel comfortable,” Delone said at his election night party shortly after the vote count began.

Delone, 40, and Boudreaux, 57, both longtime employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District, waged a spirited battle for the chance to succeed 12-year veteran Rita Walters as the seven-member board’s only black member. In the weeks after the April primary, both made scores of personal appearances throughout the district and they debated regularly.

Boudreaux was financially outgunned by Delone, the choice of the politically powerful United Teachers-Los Angeles and several other employee groups. UTLA, an increasingly important force in school board elections, provided about $130,000 of the $174,000 in money and services that Delone had reported receiving by late last month. Boudreaux had raised about $50,000 by then, about $7,000 of that came from Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, a union of principals, assistant principals and other campus administrators.

Delone peppered the neighborhoods with signs and political mailings that emphasized his roots in the community--he grew up in the 1st District--and his ideas for boosting achievement in its schools, some of the poorest in the city. He was endorsed by the Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly newspaper popular in the black community, and he had the support of most of the area’s black political leaders, including Mayor Tom Bradley, thus blunting the Boudreaux campaign’s efforts to portray Delone as an outsider.

Boudreaux drew on her longtime activities in the community to garner civic and business support and sewed up prized endorsements from the area’s politically important black ministers. She also said her administrative experience would make her unique on the board, which she said is dominated by UTLA. A majority of the current board members were elected with the help of the teachers union.

She countered Delone’s mail blitz with an energetic band of volunteers who supplemented her more modest mailings by leaving her campaign literature on voters’ doors.

Boudreaux also went on the attack. One mailer reproduced a picture from a Delone campaign flyer that showed Delone--a junior high school social studies teacher--reading to several small children, including a young girl seated on his lap. Boudreaux’s campaign was only identified by the headquarters’ address, which appeared at the bottom of the pamphlet.

“Parents do not want their little girls sitting on the teachers’ lap! It is highly improper!” said the mailer. It also criticized Delone for “begging for money” in soliciting campaign contributions from teachers on their lunch periods and for being part of the “Goldberg Machine,” a reference to retiring board President Jackie Goldberg, who has endorsed Delone.