Union Asks Parents to Help Oust Principal

A bitter fight between a Los Angeles elementary school principal and the teachers union has spilled into the neighborhood, where it threatens to inflame race relations by pitting Latino parents against the African American administrator.

Wednesday evening, the union held a meeting with about 60 Latino parents and children in the frontyard of a home near Marvin Avenue School and urged them to join its effort to remove Principal Anna McLinn.

That meeting turned tense when a small group of McLinn supporters tried to shout down the union speakers, who were white, and angrily called them “outside agitators.” As the meeting was getting started, one school employee stood in the street half a block away from the gathering and tried to rally support for her principal. She yelled into a cordless phone, “Bring all the homies you can: Crips, Bloods, whatever.”

Adrian Dove, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission who had come to observe the meeting, said he was distressed by the scene that unfolded.

“This is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen,” he said Wednesday night, shaking his head. Union leaders “can’t realize the potential danger of holding a mostly Hispanic meeting to talk about a black principal. It’s exposing the ugly raw nerve of racism that lurks beneath the surface.”

A dispute that has festered for years has become increasingly disruptive to Marvin School--where Latinos have gradually replaced blacks in the classroom--and the working-class area it serves.

“This is beyond nuts,” said the parent of one Marvin student, after watching Wednesday’s tense neighborhood meeting.

The off-campus confrontation was only the latest in a series of public spectacles that have caused some people to wonder why the campus wedged into one of the rougher Mid-City pockets--just across the freeway from where an LAPD officer was slain recently--has been allowed to spin out of control.

Leaders of United Teachers-Los Angeles, who complain that McLinn is incompetent, blame Los Angeles Unified School District administrators for failing to act decisively. But the leader of the principals union said none of UTLA’s allegations have ever been substantiated. Supt. Ruben Zacarias was unavailable for comment Thursday.

Aside from her problems with the union, McLinn, 57, has come under district scrutiny because of a recent L.A. Unified audit that found serious financial irregularities at the school. District lawyers said an internal investigation of all the issues engulfing Marvin will be completed within two weeks.

“Zacarias has been fiddling,” said teachers union President Day Higuchi. “Why are we having to do the district’s work in this case? What does it take to move off a school someone who’s patently unstable?”

McLinn, who stayed home Thursday because of stress-related illness she attributes to her mounting problems, complained that the union has dogged her for 15 of the 35 years she has worked for the district. She maintains that the union’s campaign to have her ousted is racially motivated.

“All I can see are problems caused by outside agitators--it would not make any difference if it was the Ku Klux Klan coming in,” she said. Union leaders “are trying to paint a portrait of me being mentally ill. Anybody else would have the money to hire lawyers and say, ‘You are not going to smear my name.’

“But I’m not resigning or retiring--my reputation is at stake,” she added. “If I run away, I make it easy for them.”

The long-running battle intensified in May, when Higuchi wrote Zacarias saying McLinn was “suffering from mental illness of such a degree as to render her incompetent.” The union president also expressed “extreme concern for the well-being and safety of the children, teachers and staff at Marvin.”

The letter included a “sampling” of what the school has allegedly endured in recent years. McLinn, it alleged, uses profanity, racial slurs and abusive language with teachers and children; threatens teachers who are critical of her; screams profanities over the public address system; and misuses state funds by requiring office staff to run her personal errands on school time.

Relations further deteriorated in July when McLinn clashed with union representatives on the nationally televised “Leeza” show over her unsubstantiated allegations that Los Angeles students have been abused by teachers who got away with it.

This week, the fight got nastier.

On Tuesday, as children trooped back into class, Vice Principal Belinda Vines noticed a union activist handing out fliers on the sidewalk. When she tried to photograph him, he “spread his arms wide and shook his pelvis at me,” she said. Vines has filed a formal complaint with the district.

“I was offended,” she said. “But I also worried about what the children might have thought when they saw a white man doing this to an African American woman in a position of authority.”

Responding to Vines’ accusation, the union leader in question, James Duffy, said: “She was taking a picture and I maybe, well, I just. . . .” He paused, searching for words. “Did I wiggle? Give me a break!”

He declined to be more direct.

To be sure, McLinn has lots of friends in and out of the district. A telephone call from the principal in July prompted community activist Celes King III, state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, to hold a news conference demanding a state investigation of her troubles with the union.

“This is part of a pattern,” King said at the time. “We are finding that African American teachers and administrators are being excluded from the system, and we want it stopped.”

Supporters know McLinn as an innovative, articulate and hard-working woman who helped rid Marvin of the drug dealers and gang members who used to lounge on street corners. Her office is adorned with the framed artwork of her students and color photographs of her smiling cheek-to-cheek with celebrities such as actor Samuel L. Jackson.

After becoming Marvin’s principal in 1991, McLinn instituted “pancake drills”--so called because children lie flat because shots were regularly fired in the neighborhood. To open youngsters’ minds and prepare them for the global economy, McLinn in 1994 masterminded the Dual Language Arts Magnet Center--the first of its kind in the district--based on a program in Dade County, Fla.

But critics say the daughter of an Arkansas cotton picker can be charming one day and intimidating the next. Few of the half-dozen Marvin teachers who showed up at Wednesday’s neighborhood meeting would agree to be identified for fear of retaliation.

“She called me a sneaky snake,” said one teacher.

“She pulled me out of class and said, ‘Don’t [mess] with me. If you do, I’ll write you up,’ ” said another. “She’s promised, ‘Ain’t nobody going to take me down.’ ”

Also at the meeting were Latino parents with personal stories of their own.

“One day in July I had a problem with my son,” said Rosalba Gomez, a 29-year-old factory worker, “and Anna said she didn’t have time for me, and that if I pursued it, she would call immigration.

“She said, ‘I know exactly which parents have documentation and which ones don’t.’ ”

School board member Barbara Boudreaux, who preceded McLinn as principal at Marvin, accused the teachers union of inciting such talk.

“The union has deliberately turned a monster loose in our community,” she said. “These instigators have to be stopped. They are pitting blacks against browns, and that is dangerous.

“It’s a disgraceful spectacle,” she added. “A war is being waged over the heads of our students--a war created by adults.”