Re “Zeidman Is Making It Look Easy — No Question Too Tough”
Last in a series
Whether voters are rooting for Laura Chardiet, Scott Zeidman or Nancy Goldberg when they go to the polls today, no matter how partisan their feelings, they cannot argue that Mr. Zeidman has been the most visible School Board member in history.
He only could have topped his own record by never going home, by camping out atop a Downtown flag pole where the whole community could have watched him for all the 24-hour periods of the last four years.
“I promised to be accessible, and I have been,” Mr. Zeidman said as the hardest-bitten Board race in years ended.
He had vowed four autumns ago to regularly visit every campus in the School District because members of the Board he sought to join were deemed undesirably invisible, seldom seen on the streets.
At a recent candidates forum, Mr. Zeidman, President of the School Board, said he takes about 30 hours a week away from his workaday life to conduct Board obligations.
“I spend a lot of time doing what I think is necessary for a Board member,” he said. “It is not work, per se. Going to campus to see a science fair is not work, just time.
“I spend a lot of hours every week doing what I think a School Board member should do.”
Such as duties not necessarily in view?
“Yes. Just showing up. Being there. Talking to a principal. Making a phone call, seeing what is happening. I am on the high school campus three or four days a week. I am on the Middle School campus every day. I drop my child off, then walk around campus.
“Not because I need to. But I see students, and they will say, ‘Hi, Scott. How are you?’ Parents. Invariably somebody will bring up a question. This morning I spoke with a teacher who had an issue about the high school exit exam.
“If I were not on campus, my only access would be to go through the union, and the union coming to the Board. But it just doesn’t work that way.”
Did you have a strategy for changing the way the Board was viewed when you were elected?
“Not a strategy, per se. I just vowed I would be accessible to everybody at all times.”
You and Steve Gourley drastically altered the personality of the School Board.
“I think bringing in two people with no School Board experience whatsoever at that time was helpful because we didn’t know you couldn’t do it the way we wanted to do it. So we just tried.
“We didn’t realize that boards generally don’t do things like we wanted to do. I am not talking only about changes but matters that had not gotten done before — putting a cap on the number of students in the Middle School and the high school, passing Measure EE, acknowledging that there is bullying in our schools. My gosh. Of course there is bullying. Let’s acknowledge it and take it head-on.”
Mr. Zeidman, seizing the initiative, which has been his style, organized one of the first anti-bullying task forces in the state.
Mr. Gourley became discouraged and decided months ago not to run for a second term. You didn’t.
“Steve became much more discouraged than I did.”
Why didn’t you become discouraged?
“I am discouraged because of the glacier-like speed with which school things change. The budgeting process makes no sense.”
How would you change it?
“You have to go with the state first. I was talking with somebody about this today: We have $12 million to spend on things we don’t necessarily need. But we don’t have $12 million to spend on teachers to make our class sizes smaller.
“Then you bring in someone with no budgeting expertise to run for the Board. My gosh.
“It is so difficult.
“The job is not that hard. Show up, chair, listen. But then you get to the budget, and it is a whole different world. “
How are you different from four years ago?
“Less naive. I have a much better handle on the budgeting, the process and how it works.”
When you first ran, how much did you know about budgeting?
“I run the day-to-day operations of a company that started in a garage in Culver City with $400. We now have sold over $100 million.
“If you can’t understand budgeting, you can’t run a business or anything else. Our payroll and our rent alone is seven figures. You have to be able to budget, to understand where the money goes, what it costs and how you do things.”
