Outside of the Board Room, no one heard much about Marla Wolkowitz during her eight years on the School Board.
No gossip.
No ragging.
The lone pure housewife on the Board, she never was the lightning rod two or three of her colleagues were.
But the President of the School Board is at least tied for first place in candor, and she may be in first place alone when judged on content.
Verbally tidy, when she said, ‘This is what I believe,’ no one suspected ill motivations.
With two Board meetings to go, however, she may turn a few heads with opinions she shared this morning in her farewell interview.
After a quarter-century of dense, ubiquitous involvement with the School District, since her three sons were tiny, Ms. Wolkowitz decided this summer to draw a curtain over her chair and walk away for a reason that may surprise you.
Intolerable stress.
She blames it on a new generation of young-parent activists who are demanding and loud, confrontational and unyielding. They don’t ask. They tell. Ms. Wolkowitz already has been the heart attack route. Who needs another?
Secondly, when she saw the final list of five candidates for two seats on the Board, she had a brief surge of regret, suspecting she could have won her third election. But nah, not worth risking its affect on her system.
You have had a front row seat for the School Board campaign, except you are not involved. Has it been like watching your own funeral?
“Oh, no. I don’t look at it that way. The candidates have criticized ‘the Board.’ But I haven’t heard the words ‘Marla Wolkowitz.’ I have to be the grownup and say, ‘They are talking about us as a whole. They have nothing better…’
“It is a campaign, after all. It does not reflect my campaigns when I ran. No similarities. When I ran, I made it really clear I was in love with the School District, wanted to be a part of it, looked forward to working with the sitting Board members, really respected them all
“There was no downside to the District. It was the next step after all the things I had done, working my way up. There are no similarities here. I have very little in common with any of the candidates.”
Do you identify with any of the candidates’ beliefs?
“No,” said Ms. Wolkowitz with a laugh.
“A lot of no’s, huh? I guess we all have very different perspectives. The things that are of concern to the candidates are of concern to anyone aware of the state of education in California. Therefore, the discussion is very global. It doesn’t focus on Culver City even though they may use the word ‘Culver City’ in conversation. It’s too late now for people to do research about what is important in Culver City.”
What should the candidates be doing?
“ ‘Should’ is different for everyone. When a candidate talks to one individual, and you base a whole campaign on what one unhappy individual said happened six or eight years ago, that is not indicative of how the School District is going. That is just one person who is unhappy about something.
“Speaking of unhappiness, this is what people said at last Tuesday’s special Board meeting. They said, ‘I know lots of people would have been here, if only…’ Well, if they would have been here, they would have been here.
“I have learned that just because you are vocal, it doesn’t mean you are speaking for anyone other than yourself. The whole community does not feel one way or another — until there is a vote. Then we know how the community feels. Although there is not a big turnout, we have a better idea.”
Why was Ladera Heights brought up at the Sept. 25 School Board meeting, which necessitated agendizing it for last Tuesday’s meeting?
“We asked for an update before a final decision went to the state (on the proposed mass transfer of students). It was really very casual. We were asked by a speaker, Dr. Allan Boodnick. He said, ‘Can you put in writing that comment you made that you were neutral?’ Oh, sure. What’s the big deal? No one researched it for us.”
(Editor’s Note: In formalizing the affirmation of their position two years earlier, Board members mistakenly voted ‘neutral’ instead of ‘no.’ At this week’s meeting, they officially reversed the vote.)
After serving two terms, was retiring from the Board a difficult decision?
“It was a conversation I had with myself. I weighed the pros and cons. Our (school) community has changed a lot, starting in the last two years. The people who have decided to become a little more active are different from those who used to be active, which is fine. But there is a different feeling.
“I thought, I am not able to serve you the way I would like. I got the idea that people who never before have dealt with government think that when they say, ‘This is my concern,’ our response should be, ‘We’ll fix it.’
“The reality is that a lot of people have to feel that way, enough to direct the School Board as a whole. We represent the community. We cannot go by the vocal few, whoever they are. The vocal few are not entitled to be the majority. Maybe the new people on the Board will be able to handle it better than I can.
“I just found it difficult to take the misdirected angst of younger parents, not the older parents. I don’t know why there is the change. But they have very different priorities. Their attitude seems to be, Let’s turn the public school system into a private school system — for free.
“They are very aggressive. And they are in your face. A lot of aggressiveness with a lot of misinformation being repeated.
“It makes me pretty uncomfortable. You can’t blow it off. We are all pretty empathetic. We are a small town, a small district. We are in restaurants with our neighbors. We are at the market with our neighbors. It is uncomfortable to find that a person you just had a conversation with is standing in front of you, yelling in your face, ‘How could you do this? You are ruining things,’ whatever those ‘things’ are. They are still not asking questions, and they don’t believe us.
“That is pretty uncomfortable.
“Some of the demands, some of the things people want, some of the assumptions are based, in part, on reading about other school districts. They read about the trouble in education in other school districts. They have done this instead of finding out about their own successful, high-achieving school district.”
What are the new activists searching for?
“That is not clear. Part of it is about the permit issue and state law. State law changes so that you don’t have to comply with it, That can make a difference in our School District. We are pretty lucky that people want to come here, and we didn’t have the experience of multi-million dollar loss that L.A. Unified is undergoing.
“Permits are one of their concerns, but that is something we can’t change. If we start saying no to people, we better have a pretty good reason. If we just did what some people said, we would have to fire a whole lot of staff. We are really a lot more supportive of the staff than we ever have been given credit for. Oh, well.
“We didn’t want to go around firing people. When you have fewer students, you have a smaller staff, you don’t have less crowded classrooms. With less staff, you wind up with bigger classrooms.”
What do you hear from the new activists?
“They talk about permits. They talk about class size, mainly overcrowding of the Middle School and the high school, which is not really demonstrated by the statistics we have. But (the new activists) don’t believe the statistics the District has.”
There is not overcrowding?
“No, there isn’t. Most of our teachers work five periods a day. One period a day, there are empty classrooms, no students in them. Potentially, we could take another 15 percent of students. In other school districts, there are traveling teachers. They go from room to room. They go into the empty classrooms, and they fill them.
“We are not at capacity. That word does not really exist. It is not going to exist. If we assign a number and say ‘This school only holds 200 students,’ and there are 201, people go nuts.
“The only place where there are numbers for actual class-size reduction is kindergarten through third grade, 20 or less in a classroom. And the ninth grade English, arts and math. That is it. People are just used to what we have had.”
Do you leave the School Board with regrets?
“Oh, sure. Once the candidates filed last summer and I saw who was running, I thought, ‘Gee, I should have run.’ But that probably is a really normal reaction. I have been involved with the School District one way or another for 25 years. I will still find something to do. That is not going to change. There will be something else.”
