ELECTIONS / SCHOOL BOARD : Campaigns Focus on Candidates’ Style, Impending Budget Crisis

Voters on Tuesday will cast ballots to fill a vacant board seat for the Montebello Unified School District in an election that itself has become a campaign issue.

The election is one that the school board neither wanted nor planned to hold. District voters forced the special election by gathering more than 1,000 signatures, well above the required 1.5% of registered voters.

The petition drive began after the board followed its standard practice by appointing a successor to board member Arthur Chavez, who resigned in midterm last October. Appointee Barbara Chavira served just over one month before the successful election petition forced her to step down. The seat has been vacant since January.

Chavira is trying to win her seat back. One of her two opponents is retired educator Frank Serrano. He unsuccessfully applied for the board appointment and later helped lead the petition drive for the special election. The other candidate is businessman Joe Aguilar Urquidi.

If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote Tuesday, the county will schedule a runoff between the top two vote-getters. The winner’s victory will be short-lived because the term expires in December.

And the winner will help guide the district through its worst financial crisis. In April, the district approved about $19 million in budget cuts for next year that could cost the jobs of about 200 employees, most of them teachers.

The cuts for next year include all of the district’s elementary school librarians, 20% of district nurses and numerous bilingual teachers, many of whom lack tenure.

Serrano said laying off the bilingual teachers is both inexcusable and irresponsible. About 12,800 of the district’s 33,000 students have a limited ability to speak English.

Serrano said the district’s problems stem from the lack of a master plan of educational goals. Without looking at the total picture, a “rubber-stamp” school board has been blindly approving whatever the administration recommends, he said.

“They’re very good at smoke screens and trying to cover their mistakes by saying it’s because of the bad guys in Sacramento,” he said.

Serrano, 64, worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 33 years as an elementary school teacher and principal. He takes pride in being a board antagonist. In recent years, Serrano has repeatedly questioned board decisions. He has attacked board members and administrators by name and openly called for their replacement.

Serrano’s style would make him ineffective, Chavira said. “You have to get two other votes on the board,” on the five-member body she said. “You’re not going to get their respect if you’re constantly attacking them as persons rather than dealing with the issues.”

She is a 40-year-old mother of three and a part-time quality-control inspector. She won the endorsement of the Montebello Teachers Assn. as well as the union representing non-teaching employees and the organization that represents administrators.

Chavira has raised and spent more than twice as much money as Serrano and Urquidi combined, according to the most recently filed campaign spending reports. The teachers association alone contributed $2,500 to her campaign, although like the school board, leaders of the association questioned whether the cost of the election was justified.

Serrano said the groups have supported Chavira because district power brokers want a board member they can control, a charge that Chavira angrily disputes.

Chavira would not criticize the board’s specific budget-cutting decisions, but said that it was important for a district parent to be involved. None of the other candidates or board members have children attending district schools.

“My biggest thing is to bring the parents back into participation,” Chavira said. “The state and federal government is not going to be financing education to the level they should be. Parents are going to have to be doing a lot more volunteering.”

Urquidi, the third candidate, is a 64-year-old retired father of nine. He has owned an appliance business and has sold real estate, but spent most of his career developing and managing job training programs for both the state and private industry. He was an unsuccessful Republican state Senate candidate last April.

“My first priority is to get the academics to catch up with the technology of private industry,” Urquidi said. To get students ready to become wage earners, “you have to re-gear and restructure education to what you need in the future, and that has to be done constantly.”

Urquidi said he favors unseating current board members and replacing administrators who have approved “frivolous” courses, such as “piano playing and basket weaving,” that do nothing to help students prepare for jobs.