Part I
In a School Board race destined to be remembered for its disorderliness, Prof. Patricia Siever is here to restore a sense of tidiness while toting perhaps the most powerful C.V. in the field.
[img]686|left|Prof. Patricia Siever||no_popup[/img] Vice-chair of the History Dept., at West Los Angeles College, perhaps her most muscular achievements have been off the academic playing field, backstage — in the dense but crucial areas of policy-shaping and budget-deciding by committees and boards.
Since she began community college teaching in the mid-1970s, she has found comfortable niches in all sections of academia. Automotively speaking, she is both a mechanic and a driver. She knows the complete operation. She knows how to fix things, and she also is an out-front person, a rare combination.
Away from the classroom, which she loves, she has stepped with ease into an administrative mode, which she also cherishes, where she has been a:
• Member of four community college accreditation teams
• Chair of the Commission for the Advancement of Teaching, district-wide
• Former president and vice president of the California Assn. of Community Colleges
• Member of a task force for legislative reform
• Secretary of the Faculty Guild
That provides a taste.
You can see the off-stage portrait that is forming — industriously engaged in repairing, refining or dramatically changing the infrastructure of community colleges in California, where this form of education is king.
From Faceless to Recognition?
Thus it is a largely anonymous environment from which Prof. Siever is seeking to emerge.
Seven weeks before Election Day, Prof. Siever has heard the sotte voce remarks about how different her background is from the resume of the other 5 contenders.
All of her rivals are regarded as properly local because they work inside the city limits of Culver City — and even newcomers may know that West Los Angeles College was created 40 years ago, it has sniffily been known as Not Quite Culver City. Or Just Over the Line (into Los Angeles) — euphemisms for not quite good enough.
Prof. Siever, of course, is compelled to differ. She has lived here for decades. Her four adult children were taught — only — in Culver City schools.
Piggybacked onto those suggestions were the contentions that she is a college prof — what does she know abut Culver City’s schools?
Plenty, it turns out.
If she were or were not an educator, Prof. Siever said, when she commits to a project, she comes at it from numerous angles.
Presently, she is spending her evenings shoulder-deep in research, studying recent School District and School Board history.
What Is the Difference?
As for the specific claim that community college teachers are distinct from K-through-12, Prof. Siever, without quite saying that education is education, says education is like shoelaces or pretzels — intertwined, without end, a continuum.
“Education is my life,” she says. “It isn’t just a part of it. It is teaching students and seeing them succeed, knowing they are out future.”
And it has been ever since she graduated UCLA with a bachelor’s in history and a master’s in African studies.
A no-nonsense educator throughout a college classroom career spanning more than 30 years — she once failed her own son in a class — the trajectory of her early campaign undeniably is uphill.
Prof. Siever will need to work assiduously to transcend the notion that she is better known by appearance than for her considerable academic accomplishments.
She was the last of the 6 candidates to file, barely in front of the deadline, and an unanticipated entry.
For more than 20 years, she and her husband, city commissioner Luther Henderson, have formed one of the region’s most unusually striking couples —equally tall, slender, handsome and accomplished in their fields.
In the Beginning
As a history teacher who accents the importance of context to her students, Prof. Siever’s rise to an admired pinnacle in the community college universe is the more remarkable because of where and how she came from.
South Central certainly has produced stars in a full range of professions.
But for sheer difficulty, it would be challenging to match or surpass the trials that smacked little Patricia — an only child — in her pretty face in a childhood that rapidly became bitingly ugly, then flatly intolerable.
To be succinct, young Patricia’s father was wheeled off to prison almost before she could spell the word much less comprehend its meaning.
The impact, though, she understood promptly.
Her father’s enforced departure accelerated her mother’s rate of daily, hourly consumption of alcohol.
In the third grade — when minds are to be gently nurtured at reliable intervals — young Patricia, practically on her own, was worn out from fleeing the long arm of her mother.
Rather incredibly, one afternoon at the age of 8, she escaped her mother’s home for the final time.
Without first declaring her intentions to anyone, this vulnerable child walked 34 blocks, from 18th Street to 52nd, to the home of her loving grandmother.
Why she said it or who inspired her, Prof. Siever doesn’t know.
But she firmly declared to her grandmother that she intended to go to college, and that was why she was standing there on the porch.
She lived with her grandmother for the remainder of her growing up years.
sieverpg@aol.com
(To be continued)
