Tokofsky’s files tell quite a story

The ever-rumpled David Tokofsky strolls into the Bonaventure Brewing Company 38 minutes late, talking on a cellphone, wheeling a big blue box brimming with school district files.

Almost every time I’ve met with or run into the L.A. Unified school board member, he’s been digging through towering heaps of manila files stuffed with memos, letters, charts, news clips and arcane Excel documents.

Now that he’s decided not to run for a third term, I thought it would be enlightening to take a look at what’s in these Sisyphean stacks. I thought I might even find an answer to a question that’s always perplexed me: What kind of a lunatic would want this $25,000-a-year, supposedly part-time, 1,000-hour-a-week gig? (And I ask with all due deference to the eager candidates who’ve just galloped headlong into four races for board seats.)

Before winning election to the board in 1995, Tokofsky, a UC Berkeley history and Spanish grad, had a reputation for being one of those teachers who’d try anything -- say, having lawyer friends stage a drug bust in the hall and then hold a moot court in class -- to make sure the government and social studies classes he taught at Marshall High School penetrated his students’ anti-learning defenses.

His most celebrated success came in 1987, when he reluctantly gave up coaching soccer to mentor Marshall’s Academic Decathlon team, leading the students to a national championship. In 1994 he ran for and won a board seat in a district that has since been gerrymandered to sprawl from the edge of Burbank to South Gate. He was 33. He’d been teaching nine years.

At the Bonaventure, Tokofsky, 46, plops down, orders an Arnold Palmer and reaches for a file. It takes him an hour to actually open it.

Tokofsky’s daughter has a secret signal. She puts her hand on her head and clacks her fingers like little jaws -- her sign, Tokofsky says, that he’s talking too much. I’ve learned to sit back and listen. A Tokofskyian spiel is like looking into the window of the public school washing machine, as every colorful topic and the dirt that clings to it goes tumbling past.

Over the next 45 minutes, his quickly moving lips touch upon just about everything, from the failure of L.A. politicians to make Congress understand just how significant an effect immigration has had on the school district; to ways of making the No Child Left Behind Act address the inadequacies of science education; to his plan to float yet another bond, not for construction but to ensure great teaching in smaller schools. “Revolutions,” he says, “happen in times of rising expectations.”

By the time I gently reel his seething intellect back to the files at hand, it’s almost time to go.

A week later, in another restaurant, we take another stab at the box, with interruptions only for cellphone calls from the advisor to LA Youth, a student-written newspaper that’s having trouble with a principal; a call from Ray Cortines, the mayor’s education czar, who wants to apologize that Tokofsky’s invitation to the mayor’s big education speech got yanked (the board member has ruffled some feathers); and calls and text messages from district staffers.

A sampling of the less arcane documents in the dozens if not hundreds of files in Tokofsky’s blue box includes:

* Notes from Facilities briefing: “The reason for the high cost [is that] the project has to be built in seven phases, which makes a 15-month project a 36-month project.”

* An interoffice memo: “First-quarter report on the reduction of suspensions for targeted secondary schools ... with attached outcome chart.”

* A letter from a parents group concerning an allegedly lousy teacher at a local high school.

* An open letter, re: “Disrespect for substitute teachers.” “Students laugh at administrators who come to class to admonish them.”

* A district response to a letter (attached) from a 99-year-old man who is worried that the district is going to build a school atop his City Terrace home (not true).

* A long list of recent sub-$250,000 settlements the board has paid to students and district staffers who’ve fallen down stairs, crashed district cars and the like.

Tokofsky sounds almost affectionate in terming this heap of paperwork: “The real life of the schools.”

It’s not even on his list of reasons why he decided not to run again.

What is?

1.) Money. As a board member and consultant for Green Dot Public Charter Schools, he doesn’t qualify for the district pension he started building as a teacher. With two children in elementary school, he’ll need it and a steadier income. “I can’t live off fumes anymore.”

2.) His annoyance with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s attempts to strong-arm his way into running the district.

3.)The way the leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles jerked him around about an endorsement, despite what he calls his 100% classroom teacher-oriented voting record. “They behave pubescently -- that’s the quality of the union leadership now.”

Asked to list his accomplishments, Tokofsky pops off a long one, beginning with his role in:

1.) Establishing an inspector general for the district.

2.) Getting full-day kindergarten up and running.

3.) Spawning a citizens’ oversight committee for bond issues.

4.) Increasing teachers’ salaries.

5.) Making the district more outcome-oriented, in part by using tests to measure students’ and the district’s progress.

It was his students, fired up by all his talk about the democratic process, that suggested he run for something years ago, Tokofsky says. He chose the school board because he was a teacher and union activist and because (let the violins play; let Old Glory wave) he believes school boards are a noble vestige of the true, citizen-statesman democratic principles he tried to instill in his students.

I turned to the two candidates who want Tokofsky’s job, and asked them to explain, in one short sentence, why.

* “To put children first.” -- Yolie Flores Aguilar

* “To make a positive difference in the way kids are educated in Los Angeles.” -- Bennett Kayser

I wish them well, but also suggest that each hover over Tokofsky’s blue box and cellphone for an afternoon to rethink what they’re getting into.

As Tokofsky pores over his files, Richard Alatorre, the former city councilman who ran into ethics problems while in office, approaches.

Tokofsky whispers that Alatorre once ripped him for encroaching on what he had proclaimed a Latino district.

Now Alatorre looks at the stack of files on the table and slaps a hand on Tokofsky’s back. He praises him as a good man and the one board member willing to wrestle in earnest not only with the job’s ego-gratifying politics, but also the mounds of paperwork and minutiae the district generates -- “he’s the only one who’ll say, “What about on page 45?”

Tokofsky grins. Wistfully.

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Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@latimes.com.