Educator Named to Run School Reform Effort : Education: Former Los Angeles district official Maria Casillas will head L.A. Metropolitan Project, which seeks to spread innovation countywide.

An educator who during a 20-year career in Los Angeles schools was on the front lines of issues such as bilingual education, the 1989 teachers strike and various stabs at reform, has been hired to preside over the Los Angeles Metropolitan Project, a $106-million plan for spreading innovation to schools countywide.

Maria Casillas was hired Monday by the LAMP board of directors, which will oversee her efforts to create a powerful catalyst for educational change. LAMP is funded by a five-year, $53-million challenge grant from the Annenberg Foundation. Among Casillas’ duties will be identifying an equal amount in public and private matching funds.

She also will help a diverse group of schools countywide apply for the Annenberg funds, select those that will participate, evaluate their progress and arrange for a variety of assistance to keep them on track.

“We feel confident we’ve made an absolutely great choice and . . . that Maria’s performance will bear that out,” said Virgil Roberts, the record company executive who chairs the LAMP board.

Roberts said Casillas was among 50 prospects developed by the executive recruiting firm of Korn-Ferry, which conducted the search for free. That list was cut to 20, five of whom were interviewed by the board. He said Casillas was the unanimous choice.

Casillas, 50, started out in the Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher in 1973 and quickly moved up the ladder, eventually overseeing schools in much of the central and southern parts of the district. She left in 1993 to return to her hometown of El Paso, where she provided a variety of support services to 13 school districts on behalf of the state’s education commissioner.

She characterized herself as a “humble servant from El Paso,” but said she is comfortable in corporate boardrooms as well as classrooms. She promised to spend time helping teachers create better schools and to mingle with the corporate and foundation executives who will be counted on to provide a big chunk of the matching funds that are the linchpin of the project’s financing.

“I didn’t go to finishing school,” she said. “But I will . . . listen, I will be polite, I will learn, and I will make my point. If they are very, very powerful people, I will remember that they have the power to help us and . . . we’re linked together by a chain of children.”

Casillas’ last job with the Los Angeles district was as liaison to the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now, a 4-year-old effort that now involves 87 campuses. Before that, she was a member of the group that created and marketed LEARN, which seeks to help schools improve by transferring greater power over campus operations to teachers, principals and parents.

Schools in the Los Angeles district that want to participate in LAMP will be required to first become LEARN campuses.

“Maria Casillas . . . really understands the needs of parents and the critical role they play in reform,” said Rosalinda Lugo, a parent who represented four community organizations on the LEARN task force. “She is really committed to making public schools work for all children.”

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During her career in Los Angeles, Casillas was often asked to resolve disputes with parents and community members.

In 1992 she was responsible for a principal’s transfer from a Wilmington-area elementary school because the principal did not speak Spanish and a communication gap had developed between the school and parents. She said at the time that the parents were unable to express their concerns about a lack of discipline or student motivation directly to the principal.

In 1989 she helped devise an agreement with parents of a Cudahy school that had to be closed temporarily while the seepage of a tar-like substance was cleaned up on campus. Leticia Quezada, a member of the Los Angeles district’s Board of Education, said 700 angry parents showed up at a community meeting to find out what administrators planned to do about the problem.

Casillas worked out a solution in which the students would temporarily attend classes at campuses that their parents considered safe. “She worked hand-in-hand with me in dealing with the concerns of the community,” Quezada said.

Quezada said that Casillas knows Los Angeles well and that she will forge productive working relationships with nearby districts.

Casillas was graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and earned a master’s degree nearly 20 years later in urban and bilingual education at Cal State Los Angeles.

She is married to a former Los Angeles educator, Gary Yoshinobu. She has two sons, a 26-year-old rock musician based in Los Angeles and a 23-year-old college student in Texas.