Marshall to Test Plan to Share Authority : Education: The Los Feliz area high school is one of 70 chosen to implement a new management style designed to give parents and teachers more influence.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has chosen John Marshall High School as one of 70 schools where teachers, parents and students will be allowed to assume more authority over a wide variety of school affairs.

Marshall, nestled between Silver Lake and Los Feliz, and the other campuses were chosen Friday to become participants in a new structure of school decision making known as school-based management.

“School-based management means some of the basic decisions will be made at the local school site,” Marshall Principal Deborah Leidner said. “I don’t know that there’s anything that I do here that can’t be shared.”

The concept of school-based management came out of contract negotiations with teachers last May. As a first step, the contract called for each school to establish a council that allows teachers, parents and community leaders a voice in decisions that previously were left to the principal and the district.

The councils so far have been limited to addressing issues that involve event scheduling, student discipline, teacher education, budgeting of some school funds and policies concerning the use of school equipment. With school-based management, Leidner said, the councils will be allowed to try to make fundamental changes in areas such as teacher hiring and campus curriculum--even if those changes conflict with basic district policies or contract stipulations.

Some members of Marshall’s council have said in the past that they are skeptical about whether the district ultimately will allow schools more autonomy. But district officials said this week that they are serious about sharing power.

“I think we’re in uncharted waters and everybody’s a bit apprehensive,” said Joe Rao, the district’s administrative coordinator of school-based management. “But basically, there’s a commitment by the district to give to a local school the opportunity to forge a new kind of educational program.”

Marshall’s council, made up of 16 teachers, parents, administrators and students, will submit by June 15 a proposal for specific policy and governance changes. Some members said they are hoping that more flexibility in making decisions will allow them to address issues of ethnic diversity, attendance, the dropout rate and student achievement in ways specific to their school.

The proposal first must be approved by the principal and a majority of faculty and parents, then submitted to the Board of Education and the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles. Any one of those groups can accept or reject any part of the proposal, said Barbara Knight, a UTLA representative at Marshall.

Reaching a consensus on which measures to recommend may not be easy, Knight and other council members said. Last week, a council subcommittee informally proposed that student attendance be linked to grades as a way to curtail truancy. District policy prohibits marking students down for repeated absences.

A survey showed that teachers favored the idea, students heavily opposed it and administrators were “uncomfortable” about it, Knight said. Alternatives are being discussed and may be included in the specific proposal due in June.

“It was interesting to me how much controversy was sparked just by asking the question,” Knight said. “But it made people realize they could get involved in changing the way things are done here--that they had a voice.”

The composition of the council has become an area of disagreement. The council includes five community members who may or may not be parents, seven teachers and one student, all of whom are elected. The elections are school-based and community members are notified through flyers and newspaper notices.

Some parents and students say they want equal representation with teachers, which they may recommend in the proposal for setting up the new management structure at the school.

“We all have a voice now in the process,” said Christine Stemnock, a parent on the council. “I hope and I feel that nobody is going to turn this into a power play. I just wish there were more parents and students elected to the council so they could be a bigger part of the consensus.”

That may not sit well with teachers, said Knight, who added that she supports increased parent involvement but thinks that because teachers are responsible, they should have more authority than parents in school affairs.

“My feeling is that anything we implement, the majority of work has to be done by the teachers. It was the teachers who lost nine days of pay, walked the picket lines and worried about their careers so this could happen,” Knight said.

“But I also want parents to be included, because the duty has to be shared.”