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.
The five challengers for the two open School Board seats have been debating the merits of the permit system and whether it should be abolished.
Questions Without Answers
Like many persons who have sat in the audience through the early Candidate Forums, the community activist Dr. Loni Anderson is frustrated by a lack of precise information, and she emphasized “precise.”
“We need to know much more about the permit situation than we do, than anybody in the public does,” she said. “We need answers. This is not about saying that we must have a certain number of permit students or that we must do away with permits altogether.
“It is about understanding what the current problem is. Two questions must be answered:
• A cost-benefit analysis is needed to determine the benefits and the detriments.
• Is the permit population a problem.
“When you don’t have answers,” said Dr. Anderson, “you can’t come up with solutions. You must define the problem. It hasn’t been defined, and I don’t know why.
“Another question I want answered is, Does the state mandate that a District must take in a certain number of permit students because some Culver City students are attending schools outside of the District?”
Turning to Dollars
She has been listening closely to candidate Steve Gourley’s critical descriptions of accounting practices and tardy budgetary filings.
A nagging problem, said Dr. Anderson, “is that we don’t know enough about what is going on. I don’t how the District runs its programs and I don’t know who the responsible persons are.
“The perception is that the School District could be doing a lot better. But are people’s hands tied by regulations?
“Being a solution-oriented person, I want to know which are the responsibilities of the Superintendent and which are the School Board’s jobs.”
Returning to another recurring theme of Mr. Gourley’s, Dr. Anderson would like to know why the School Board refused to work on a co-operative basis with the City Council in the 1990s when meeting space was offered at City Hall.
Having been an eyewitness at meetings to the historic animosity between the two elected bodies, she is convinced that the School Board is driving the friction.
The Dark Natatorium
Dr. Anderson is among a growing number of residents increasingly restless over the “stubbornness” of the School Board in its ongoing refusal to re-open the Natatorium. For 16 years, the indoor swimming facility has been shuttered.
“The city has offered financial help to the School District (to re-open the Natatorium), but the School Board won’t budge,” Dr. Anderson said. “I know the School Board has the funds to rebuild the Natatorium. But there aren’t enough funds to maintain it. That is the problem. I am confident there is a solution. But all parties need to work toward it.”
The present five members of the School Board have been together for six years. “I am trying to think of something they have accomplished,” Dr. Anderson said.
