The beauty of my candidacy, says Laura Chardiet, is that I will bring so many inter-related skills to the School Board — if she is elected to one of the two seats available on Election Day, one week from tomorrow.
As recently as this morning, she was called the most comprehensively qualified contender to run for office in years, an assessment with which few objective observers would disagree.
Perhaps the largest compliment Ms. Chardiet has earned entering the last week of the Hundred Day campaign is that months of probing have not uncovered a detectable weakness.
She has melded her quarter-century professional record with round-the-clock community volunteering for the past decade, throughout the school days and nights of her son and daughter.
Only when sleeping is she not volunteering or working for LAUSD.
She tells audiences about her hefty and unique skillset — career-long educator, teacher, administrator, budgeting mastermind, arch-collaborator, consensus-builder and second most important talent, she delivers results.
The School Board attracts a seasoned, accomplished, resumé-brimming master of the budget once every Ice Age. No one can remember the last one before Ms. Chardiet, veteran LAUSD grant administrator of an adult literacy program.
For the past 10 years, she has been working with the grant that she has built into a $15 million fund. For the past five years, on a part-time basis, she oversaw and grew the grant by $2 million. She was placed permanently in control of the grant program after becoming a School Board candidate.
“My principal responsibility,” Ms. Chardiet said, “is to establish goals and objectives, and then to work to make sure we meet them. I am talking about learning outcomes and core performances for 100,000 students achieving learning gains, getting their GED or their high school diploma or getting a job, or being able to retain their job or transitioning into career in technical education programs or post-secondary education programs.
“I have to fulfill the requirements of the grant.”
Ms. Chardiet leads a staff of 38, who work at school sites to implement the adult literacy program. “I manage them,” she said. “We have in-service days, training and meetings to make sure all of them are on target and understand what their goals are.
“Those people at the school sites are teacher-advisors to help teachers implement the program.”
Ms. Chardiet understands the fine print, the nuanced language, and she can expound for hours on her findings.
But expertise in numbers is a tough sell in a political campaign. Like trying to convince the judges of a beauty contest that an ugly entrant is ravishing on the inside.
Question: Besides owning a record for profitably handling multi-million dollar budgets, what other qualifications of yours match that for significance?
“I have a proven ability for solving problems, to assess and resolve problems. Certain members of the community are concerned about how the Capital Improvement funds will be spent. Besides deciding how much should be spent on each project, I bring an ability to analyze information and criteria to establish how much should be spent.”
What distinguishes you from your four rivals?
“The breadth and scope of my training and experience. That’s the biggest difference, along with my background in working with community members, and my ability to collaborate.”
(To be continued)
