COLUMN ONE : ‘It’s Like Juggling a Chain Saw’ : That’s how affable L.A. schools chief Sid Thompson sees his job. His peacemaking skills may be his biggest asset in steering the strife-torn district through reform.

Sidney A. Thompson, the former naval officer and popular math teacher who captains the nation’s second-largest school system, often alludes to seafaring dangers when he talks about the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I did not take command of the Titanic,” he said at his first school board meeting as superintendent 20 months ago.

To a group of principals: “All I ask is don’t torpedo us while we are trying not to hit” an iceberg.

After Thompson took command Nov. 4, 1992, his lumbering vessel was almost broken into small pieces by political foes and nearly had to be bailed out of bankruptcy court. Then, just as he began to chart a new course, the Jan. 17 earthquake struck, badly damaging 160 schools.

“Another torpedo, another torpedo,” he said the week after the quake, with 640,000 Los Angeles kids suddenly out of class.

In his own style, the educator whose schooling began on the tiny West Indies island of Bequia is just being optimistic. Looking on the bright side is a character trait for Thompson, who traded a young man’s dream of the merchant marine for teaching algebra to admiring adolescents. He steadily rose through school district ranks, promoted for dutifully following orders, while also raising four children as a single parent.

And now, this affable educator with an upbeat attitude is attempting to control a bureaucracy in which he has spent a 38-year career and steer it through a historic reform effort.

“At the moment, I don’t necessarily think kids are better off because I’m here. But I think the prognosis for them is better,” said Thompson, 62, who this week won a contract to serve until 1997, at $141,000 annually. “Kids won’t be better off until achievement rises. That won’t happen until we can build teams at schools that are committed to change. And that’s what we are all about.”

In a 700-square-mile school district as complex, troubled and racially diverse as Los Angeles Unified, no one expects Thompson to solve all the problems: a nearly 30% dropout rate, student test scores below state and national averages, a demoralized teaching corps, deteriorating school buildings, campus shootings and a bureaucracy known for inertia.

He is, however, a home-grown leader whose strength is that he knows the inner workings of the intricate school system. He’s not a flashy politician--or, many say, an education visionary. But he may provide stability in the throes of education reform.

For the foreseeable future, all seven members of the Board of Education, which can hire and fire the superintendent, want Thompson to lead as the district re-creates what school means in Los Angeles.

“The vision thing has been provided from outside the L.A. Unified School District,” said school board member Leticia Quezada, a former president of the panel, referring to the LEARN reform plan drafted over two years by 600 community and business leaders, parents and educators. Under LEARN, principals working with teachers and parents are empowered to make virtually all school decisions. “The role that Sid has taken is that he will implement the vision,” she said.

School board member Warren Furutani added: “My personal opinion is that Sid has not only stabilized the school district, but really gotten the reform movement going, even after the earthquake literally broke things up. He never acts tired, he just moves forward.”

The straight-talking Thompson is clear on his agenda.

“You will not hear me making some grand statement like ‘It’s my intention to lead kids into the 21st Century,’ ” he said. “I’m going to talk to proper structuring of the administration. I’m going to give more authority to the schools. And those two things are for one reason--to support the schools.”

While his execution of reform has come under fire in some quarters as vague and confusing, his sanguine spirit seems contagious. In a school system ruptured by employee strife, disillusioned parents and troubled kids, many say his peacemaking talents are his most valuable asset.

“He has the respect and friendship of many, many people throughout the school district,” said Robert Wycoff, president emeritus of Arco and a founding member of LEARN. “I think he can draw on that to get the kind of changes that are going to be needed.”

The weighty assignment of Los Angeles schools chief is in the hands of a man from humble beginnings. Shortly after his birth in Los Angeles, his parents moved to Bequia, where he attended a public school built on stilts on the beach until second grade. His family later settled in Hollywood and he attended Belmont High School. His father worked as a Lockheed Corp. engineer while his mother stayed home with four children.

He dreamed of the sea and earned a bachelor of science degree from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kingsport, N.Y. He served on the USS Rochester as a Navy lieutenant during the Korean War.

He left the Navy with no clear career path ahead. In 1956 he walked up to the personnel division of the Los Angeles City School District and stood in line to ask for a teacher’s application.

“I said I happened to have had a lot of mathematics,” Thompson recalled. “They were desperate for math teachers. They told me I would have a job in the fall.”

It was at Pacoima Junior High School in 1957 that the young Thompson found himself in his first school crisis: the midair collision of two planes that rained flaming debris onto a playground of children, killing two of them.

“I heard this screaming sound and I thought it was a bomb. I thought we were at war again,” he said, recalling students running to him with ashen faces, mothers scaling fences to reach their youngsters. “It is as clear as day, an experience I’ll never forget.”

What his former Pacoima math students remember from those years was that Mr. Thompson was one awesome teacher--a muscular, fit, 24-year-old with a deep, confident voice and a penchant for touch football games with the boys after school.

“He was the most popular teacher,” said Howard Wang, 47, now principal at a private elementary school in Northridge. “Everyone hung around his class just to be around him. He took us bowling after school, played football with us. . . . He had his rules and if you broke them he would talk to you after class, tell you why he was mad and what you needed to do to correct things.”

Thompson can calm a raging parent, defuse tense exchanges at a school board meeting, inspire a jittery school kid. He defends his district without becoming defensive. At receptions for longtime employees, he often greets people with a hug or hearty slap on the back.

Recently, an aggressive group of parents demanded a meeting with Thompson to present a controversial list of demands for increasing parental power in schools. They emerged hours later laughing and smiling.

“I never thought I’d be saying this, but I felt like he really listened and will give us a fair shake,” said Gloria Clifford of Northridge.

“This is a talented, sensitive man who understands human relations as well as anybody I have ever seen,” said Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who spent many pressurized hours with Thompson last year mediating the bitter teacher contract dispute.

“Sid is a nice man,” said Helen Bernstein, president of the 28,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles union, which was forced to accept a 10% pay cut for its members in the first year of Thompson’s reign.

But is being a nice-guy insider good enough for the behemoth Los Angeles Unified School District?

“He is in over his head,” Bernstein said.

“He is literally in an impossible situation,” Brown said.

Thompson’s mission is complex: Cut the bureaucracy. Empower principals and teachers. Get parents involved. Improve the district’s public image. Don’t upset the school board. Have the heart of a teacher and the cunning of a business magnate. Do all this with the overriding goal of raising the lagging academic achievement of Los Angeles youth. And do it without any additional money.

It’s a task that eats up big-city schools chiefs. “The sad part about urban superintendents is that they have very little longevity,” said Joseph Fernandez, president of the Council for Great City Schools who was ousted as New York school chancellor last year by a newly elected school board. “The last count of superintendents of the 50 largest school districts showed that two-thirds had less than two years.”

In the next few months Thompson faces his greatest test yet.

He has just entered intense negotiations with the district’s feisty teachers union, which says it won’t tolerate a continuation of pay cuts. A potentially volatile strike could occur the first week of school. To avert a walkout Thompson must find a way to squeeze money out of a budget already cut by a quarter over the past five years--or find some other way to persuade teachers to stick with him.

He must navigate through this task while avoiding the types of troubles that have upset his tenure thus far.

Under his leadership the district lost out on a $15-million National Science Foundation grant. The district has been given a second chance at the funds, but if approved, the award will not come until next year.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 17 earthquake, schools were caught woefully ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, lacking basic supplies and communication equipment. Six months later, a promised evaluation of district emergency preparedness has not been finalized and released to the public.

While Thompson moved quickly to decentralize the district into self-governing clusters of high schools and their feeder campuses, the plan was criticized by several high-ranking district officials, union leaders and parent activists for its lack of detail.

Also, LEARN--Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now--enters Year 2 with 87 schools on board, but concerns abound that the plan is not catching on fast enough.

“It’s like juggling a chain saw,” Thompson said of his job, with a self-deprecating laugh. “Everything you touch can cut you. . . . Sure there are times in this job when you say, ‘Good God.’ . . . But for my own sanity and for my own professional drive, what I try to ask myself is: ‘How bad can it get?’ ”

Privately, some school board members, top staff and education leaders have seen fissures in Thompson’s administrative skills, but they say it’s hard to level a punch at such a friendly man. And, they say, it is crucial for major education players to present a unified front as they pursue a reform agenda that calls for collaboration.

“It’s totally frustrating,” said one community activist close to the issues. “It’s key for any superintendent to have support. So everyone holds hands in public. Then we all go home and don’t talk to each other.”

There is concern in some ranks that Thompson, in his effort to please disparate interests--has promised too much to too many people and is not thoroughly following up on agreements he makes with employee groups, board members and staff.

The activist parents are still clamoring. The same woman who left smiling from his office months ago accused him at a recent board meeting of “paying lip service” to their demands.

Connie Moreno, staff representative for the 5,000-member union representing mainly clerical and other white-collar workers, said, “He sits there, listens to you and agrees, but then nothing happens.”

Former board President Quezada, known for her blunt, no-nonsense communication style, says Thompson’s cooperative demeanor can be misinterpreted.

“What happens is that in his commitment to say, ‘I’ll look into that,’ people are left with the impression that it’s going to be resolved,” she said. “And the fact is not everything can be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.”

Some have also said Thompson made a bad move by embarking on a reform plan without first energizing the administrative ranks with new blood.

With one notable exception--the hiring of district finance czar William Magee, a former Arco executive--Thompson is attempting to turn the district around by surrounding himself with people like himself: career district bureaucrats and administrators.

The 27 leaders of the new high school clusters are virtually all administrators from the former regional divisions that he eliminated. His nine top deputies have served most of their careers in district halls of administration.

“He embraced people who cannot help the district grow,” said one school board member who did not want to be named and is concerned about Thompson’s inner circle of advisers.

But just suggest that his people are not up to par, and the steadfast Thompson pipes up:

“People make blanket statements about my staff and say, ‘Oh, they are all from inside the system so they are not good.’ Hell! The generals of the U.S. Army didn’t come from Norway,” he retorts.

“Just because someone has had a a previous job and has experience in this district doesn’t mean that they are bad or incompetent. It doesn’t mean they are a BUREAUCRAT ,” he said. “Hey, you could say that about me.”

And some do.

“My perception of Sid personally is that he was always kind of the second banana,” said Wayne Johnson, former teachers union president who remains a potent union leader. “Sid was always at meetings taking notes. He was all show and no go, that was the knock on him for many years. He worked his way up the ranks without really distinguishing himself.”

After a seven-year stint as principal of Crenshaw High School in the 1970s, Thompson began his ascent into the upper ranks of district administration. At home, he was a single dad, divorced and raising four teen-agers.

In 1977 he married Julieta Narvaez, a bilingual education expert who speaks fluent Spanish and is now principal of Bellagio Road Newcomer Center for immigrant children.

Said Bill Honig, former state superintendent of public instruction: “I think Sid is looked at as a good, journeyman administrator. He doesn’t come off as one of these blazing reformers. But that doesn’t mean anything. I mean Harry Truman didn’t either. He came right out of the system, but had the guts to do something about it.”

When Thompson’s predecessor, Bill Anton, abruptly resigned from the post in October, 1992, frustrated by what he said was a school board that micro-managed his administration and a too-powerful teachers union, Thompson, the No. 2 man at the time, was appointed interim superintendent under a swirl of racial politicking. Many Latino groups had wanted Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias appointed to the post.

“The problem Sid will face is the belief in this culture that you can wave a wand and instantly things will change and if they don’t change, you are not waving the right wand,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, a former school board president and teacher. “If he can convince the public that the only thing instant is Cup of Soup, the window of opportunity is there for him.”

Thompson agrees that he can’t wait around for better economic times to launch reform.

“In looking at the state budget, as I look down the line four or five years, I don’t think things are going to be much different than they are today,” he said. “So I can’t dwell on the fact there is not enough money. I have to move things on course.”

And this kind of determination comes from a man who takes his Titanic talk seriously.

“I know those icebergs are still out there,” he said last month in his office. “But I haven’t hit any yet.”