Not Much Heat in Torrance School Board Race

The last time Torrance school board members William Blischke, Ann Gallagher and Carol O’Brien ran for office, district schools were being closed, administrators were bickering and incumbents were stepping down.

Compared to the tide of discontent that swept them into office four years ago, this year’s Torrance Unified School District campaign has been more of a stroll than a race, the incumbents say.

Even the challengers--John Eubanks, who three years ago was busy trying to get four of the five board members recalled, and substitute teacher Timothy Beck, a political newcomer--agree there is little to excite voters in the Nov. 7 election.

Peppering their campaign forums with such buzz phrases as strategic planning, shared decision-making and win-win bargaining, the candidates have been trying to drum up interest in the election--in which three of the school board’s five seats are at stake--as much as they have been trying to draw interest toward themselves.

“I don’t think this election really has any major issue,” said Rich Sloan, president of the local chapter of the California School Employees Assn., which represents the district’s 160 clerical workers.

“We’re not talking about busing or closing schools or anything to get people all fired up,” he said.

Despite the slow pace of issues, however, both Sloan’s union and the Torrance Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 870 teachers, have recommended that their members reject two of the incumbents and cast votes only for Blischke and Eubanks.

“We just felt that they were most in support of our position, although we don’t agree with any of the candidates 100%,” said teachers association Executive Director Bill Franchini. He said the association’s 16-member board made its recommendations after reviewing the candidates’ positions on 11 issues.

Incumbents O’Brien and Gallagher say they and Blischke agree on most things, including the need for child care, reducing class sizes and improving salaries. But Franchini said the women’s voting records and comments indicate they do not clearly understand the union’s position.

O’Brien and Gallagher, however, say their understanding of the community, the students and the schools are most critical.

O’Brien, 42, says her key advantage is that she is a full-time school board member. A homemaker with two teen-age sons, O’Brien is running for her second term and prides herself on visiting every school at least once during each academic year.

“I still have children in school, and I care about all the children,” she said. “I didn’t come in with an ax to grind or as a steppingstone to something else.”

Focusing on after-school child care and programs for at-risk youth, such as drug education programs and special classes for kindergarten-age children not yet ready for school, O’Brien says she hopes to improve education by improving the child’s attitude about it.

“Most kids do their drinking and drugs after school,” she said. “If we could give them some place to be and something to do, that would solve a lot of the problems right there.”

Gallagher, 49, says schools are perfect for before- and after-school child care because they have the proper facilities available during the right hours.

“People trust us with their children,” said Gallagher, a former high school teacher who has been a homemaker and community activist for the past 26 years. She also is running for a second term.

“I see a lot of little kids out there that need (child care) their mommies and daddies can trust.”

Although Gallagher says reducing the number of students in each class should be the board’s primary focus during the next five years, Gallagher said the board should not be too hasty to spend money recently made available for that purpose by Proposition 98.

State legislation recently signed by the governor will make even more money available for cutting class sizes, Gallagher said.

She noted that if the board had rushed to hire teachers after the first $4 million of Proposition 98 money became available in September, the district would not have been able to prove a need for the additional money provided by the new law.

Board President Blischke, 49, who also is running for a second term, supports cutting class sizes and providing child care, but he also has focused his campaign on the need to plan for the future.

Blischke recently won the board’s support for a $10,000 survey of teachers, administrators, students and parents at each school to determine the strengths and weaknesses at each campus.

Calling the concept “strategic planning,” Blischke hopes citizen committees at each school will be able to use the survey’s information to decide how best to improve their performance.

“If one school finds a lack of parental involvement or a problem with math, they can create individualized plans to improve that,” said Blischke, executive assistant to the president of California State University, Dominguez Hills.

“By giving more autonomy to each school site, we can more efficiently use the resources of the district,” he said.

Challenger Eubanks, 44, an engineering manager making his first try for public office, supports that kind of school-based control, arguing that individual school councils should be given even more authority.

His key concern, however, is making sure the board does not close down any more schools.

Three years ago Eubanks headed a group of parents who petitioned for recall of every school board member but Blischke after the board voted to close Jefferson and Newton middle schools.

Although Blischke also voted to close the schools, the parents chose not to seek his recall because “he came out and listened and made the effort to work with us,” Eubanks said.

After the recall effort fell several thousand signatures short, Eubanks decided to run for the school board himself. However, he opted not to run two years ago, partly, he said, because the antagonism caused by the recall was too fresh.

“I just feel that somebody has to get up there and say the status quo is not good enough,” Eubanks said. “If all these incumbents say all these things--class size reduction, child care, etc.--are high priority, why hasn’t anything been done?”

Beck, 41, a former kidney bank supervisor and a member of the Torrance Library Commission, has focused his campaign on urging greater cooperation between the city and school library systems, including sharing computer resources and possibly enlisting the city to operate school libraries after school hours.

But Beck also has leveled charges that school board actions in recent years have been riddled with “ethics violations, nepotism, double deals and contract bingo.”

If elected, he intends to ask Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to review recent board contracts, although Beck says he is not aware of any specific criminal wrongdoing.

“That’s why it should be investigated,” he said. “Some of these things just don’t look right to me.”

Beck said the board has not dealt well with the AIDS crisis. He said he wants all members of school wrestling teams to be tested for AIDS, because he believes the close contact and blood-letting involved in the sport creates the greatest risk of infection.

An occasional math and science substitute teacher, he also would like to set up an academic improvement program he calls “Take the Hill,” in which Torrance schools would try to earn higher test results than schools on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATES