Candidates for the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education debated the role of charter schools, protections for undocumented students and the district’s budget at a UCLA forum Wednesday.
Candidates Allison Holdorff Polhill, Greg Martayan, Nick Melvoin and incumbent Steve Zimmer discussed their positions for the District 4 school board seat, which includes Westwood. The office of the external vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council partnered with Pedro Noguera, a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences, to host the event in the Kerckhoff Grand Salon.
About 150 people attended, including students from Noguera’s class on education policy.
Melvoin, an attorney and former middle school teacher, said he supports the right of parents to choose public, nonprofit charters, but thinks the growth of charters is an indictment of LAUSD and makes the district lose funding.
Melvoin said he would like to implement charter schools’ successful practices in district schools. Zimmer, the board member for District 4, said he only supports new charters when they offer revolutionary education models.
Martayan, an education reform advocate, said he is concerned about the lack of charters in the city’s minority communities and met with organizers to bring more charter options to those communities.
Polhill, a school trustee and attorney, disagreed because she thinks most charters are located in underserved communities, not privileged areas.
All of the candidates expressed support for the district’s sanctuary policies to protect undocumented students, which include refusing to turn over information about undocumented students or employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We will not cooperate with immigration enforcement in any way, shape or form,” Zimmer said.
Polhill said she thinks the district needs to better address the needs of its Latino population by encouraging parent involvement and making sure English language-learners have safe, appropriate spaces to learn and socialize.
Polhill also said she has worked to preserve diversity in her position on the board of a charter school. She said she promoted socioeconomic diversity in the school by keeping buses available for students on free and reduced lunch.
Melvoin said he reimagined the district’s school assignment process with a statistician to make schools more socioeconomically diverse. He pointed to school districts like Hartford, Connecticut that have put magnet and dual immersion schools in low-income areas to attract wealthy students. Zimmer also said he thinks dual immersion schools are important because they make the language of Spanish-speaking students and families an educational advantage.
Candidates also discussed ways to make the city’s teaching force better reflect the demographics of its students.
Zimmer said he has worked to diversify the city’s teachers by expanding teaching academies and pipeline programs for teacher education. Melvoin said he supports building teacher pipelines with universities and training parents to be early childhood educators.
Martayan said he thinks LAUSD needs to provide incentives and a better working environment to attract teachers.
Candidates also discussed the LAUSD budget.
Zimmer said he thinks a lack of funding per student contributes to budget issues. He added he helped balance the district’s budget for eight years in a row by cutting education bureaucracy and focusing on school sites.
However, Polhill said the school board increased education administration by 22 percent in a period of declining enrollment.
“For the last eight years, we have not been in a budget crisis,” Polhill said. “However, the (school board’s) handling of that budget is a crisis.”
Melvoin said he wants to make the school district budget more transparent, implement cost-saving measures and find new revenue sources. He added he thinks the district has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on failed technology projects.
Martayan said the district pays hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for child abuse cases. He said he would balance the budget by doing more to protect students from abuse, preventing expensive abuse lawsuits.
Martayan also said he thinks the other candidates rely too much on funds from out-of-state investors trying to make money off of the election. Melvoin noted that direct donations to his campaign are limited to $1,100 but some political interest groups that have advertised in support of him have spend more than that.
Los Angeles residents can vote for school board members on March 7. Westwood residents can vote by mail until Feb. 28 and must send their ballots to the registrar’s office by March 10, or drop them off at various locations in the area.