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After careening through three public forums, the five candidates for the School Board have squeezed the air out of most subjects — we will take a closer look at reducing permits to help thin out the perceived crowded population at the upper schools and crowded classrooms; we will fix poor communication between the School District and the community; we will be more transparent Board members, accessible, weekly, to the community; we’d like to see the Natatorium re-opened; the Board will be upgraded regardless of which two of us you elect — one other topic remains dangling, Ladera Heights.

At every forum, the question of how to respond to Ladera Heights has been posed.

Brotman Medical Center, financially flailing, formally and dauntingly filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, either last night or this morning, sources told the newspaper today.

Former Mayor Ed Wolkowitz, a bankruptcy attorney, said this afternoon that four of every five Chapter 11 filings “fail to reach a successful solution. Each case is unique, of course. But, typically, these businesses fail because people waited too long to file.”

From a pure commerce standpoint, it was not evident this early whether the last-resort act will salvage a fiscally quivering business or merely prolong the agony.

The cozy audience at the Raintree Clubhouse last night probably was the luckiest in the almost-expired series of community forums for the five School Board candidates.

They saw the real contenders without any accoutrements.

Gone was the tentativeness of the forum at Lin Howe School.

Gone also was the tightly structured format of the Culver City Homeowners Assn.

Down to the last week and a half before Election Day, Steve Gourley, who surprised everybody but his family by announcing a run for the School Board, has lived up to his dynamite resume.

For weeks, the community did not know what to make of this hard-driving, ebullient politician with a fireworks personality and a matching reputation that some thought might be a liability.

Going into tonight’s next-to-last School Board Candidates Forum — at 7:30 in the Raintree Condo Complex Clubhouse — the number of permits issued every September by the School District remains the most hotly disputed subject in this contest.

Twenty percent of the District enrollment consists of permit students, out-of-towners who have chosen Culver City for a variety of reasons. The out-of-towners are embraced by the District because each represents one more bump-up in revenue from the state government.

Sinking ever deeper into a swirling sea of debt estimated in the tens of millions, Brotman Medical Center of Culver City, aging, creaky and with its credibility further threatened, is flirting with closure, according to sources.

Limping and gasping for financial air once again, a permanent shutdown of the 83-year-old hospital has been rumored before.

At the weekend, Brotman was reported on the brink of filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ostensibly, this would give the obsessively secretive management team time to reorganize its debt and make a dent in its worst problems.

So much for the four-month groundswell that steamrolled across the South Sepulveda Boulevard neighborhood last summer, proclaiming that only an orderly redevelopment plan could rescue Sunkist Park residents and merchants from the massive makeover hatched by the feared developer Bob Champion.

Ever since the City Hall-organized Citizens Advisory Committee floated an orderly plan of its own last June — a lightly disguised escape route technically called a Specific Plan — neighborhood support and excitement have been running high.

The almost extreme courtliness that the five candidates for the School Board extended toward each other in the first community forum on Tuesday night finally — and suddenly — frayed at last night’s forum.

At precisely 9 o’clock at the Vets Auditorium, the highest-profile candidate Steve Gourley, evidently worn down, stunned the room with an entirely unanticipated declaration.

He decided the well-plotted, smooth-running, fast-paced, heavily informative program was over.

The clock and fatigue or possibly common sense told him so.

With nary a mis-step, not even a baby one, the five evenly matched candidates for the School Board sailed through their first community-wide forum so deftly last night that if Chris Columbus ever decides to essay a comeback, any could qualify as his chief navigator.

For an hour, they responded to 19 written questions in a rat-ta-tat-tat rhythm with a one-minute cap on answers.

The only way for Alan Elmont or Michael Eskridge or Steve Gourley or Roger Maxwell or C. Scott Zeidman to draw attention to himself would have been to commit a jaw-hanging gaffe.

Following hours of testimony in hearings convened yesterday in downtown Los Angeles by state Sen. Gloria Romero, the 400 striking court interpreters of Los Angeles County have agreed to return to work, probably before the end of the week, union sources reported this afternoon.

Among the less visible employees in the court system, an estimated 75 to 90 percent of the certified interpreters walked off their jobs in early September. They claimed then and now the central issues were “fairness and equal treatment.”