L.A. School Chief to Resign, Citing Job Frustrations

Just one year after launching a sweeping five-year plan to improve student achievement, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Sid Thompson abruptly announced Monday that he will resign at the end of his current contract, which expires in June 1997.

However, Thompson said--and members of the school board and his senior staff confirmed--that he had been contemplating resigning from the $162,900-a-year job for some time as both his age and the frustrations of the job increased.

“We were a little surprised about the announcement coming today,” said Assistant Supt. Judy Burton, who learned of Thompson’s plans in a morning staff meeting. “But everyone has so much respect for Sid as a person, we can see how hard this job is on him.”

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Thompson, the first African American to head the district, will turn 65 next month and has worked for the district for 40 years, beginning as a math teacher in Pacoima. During his nearly four-year tenure as superintendent, he said Monday, he learned that reforming a large school system is a job with no natural conclusion.

“School districts are dynamic. . . . You will never say, ‘That’s it. It’s done,’ ” Thompson said. “I had to come to grips with that.”

Thompson, a Belmont High graduate, said he plans to seek other work, perhaps related to mathematics or school reform. But he said he will be looking for something less demanding so he can spend more time with his wife and grandchildren.

“My wife and I keep saying we want to spend a Sunday in the backyard, sitting in our chairs with our silly dog, with me not worrying about what’s coming up in closed session or regular session [of the school board] on Monday.”

Thompson said he gave 14 months notice to leave the Board of Education ample time to find a successor. But some people questioned whether announcing so far in advance will make him an ineffective lame duck.

Board member David Tokofsky said he will be asking, at superintendent search meetings that are to begin Monday, whether it would be prudent to buy out the remainder of Thompson’s contract.

“Fourteen months without an incentive to perform doesn’t help with the public credibility of the institution,” Tokofsky said. “It could result in more soft ideals and major institutional drift.”

There was some speculation around district headquarters Monday that Thompson timed his resignation to avoid another bruising annual performance review, a process that already has begun but usually culminates in confrontational closed-door meetings with the school board in June.

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Helen Bernstein, president of the main teacher’s union, suggested that the school board had sent Thompson a subtle message as early as last June by not asking him to stay on past the end of his current contract.

“It wasn’t like they were giving him a vote of confidence here,” she said.

Bernstein and others criticized the Board of Education for reneging on commitments to not meddle in day-to-day administration of the district, made when Thompson was named superintendent in July 1993 after serving in an acting capacity for nine months.

“I think Sid got a raw deal,” Bernstein said. “They said they would stay out of the nitty gritty details of running a district and that was not true from Day 1. . . . It’s hard for people to take a superintendent seriously when he can’t control his board.”

However, Thompson said his relationship with the board was not a factor in his decision, and board President Mark Slavkin characterized the relationship as “good.” He said the board had not yet discussed Thompson’s future.

Thompson leaves the district at a crucial time, as programs he began or bolstered enter important phases of evolution. LEARN, the plan to decentralize control of the district, is nearing the halfway mark, with nearly 300 schools involved.

Although LEARN began while Thompson was still a deputy superintendent, LEARN Chairman Robert E. Wycoff credited Thompson on Monday with “getting us well down the road to reform.”

An outside review of LEARN completed last year, however, criticized the district for not moving fast enough to embrace its central philosophy, which involves letting schools govern themselves and control their own budgets.

A year ago, Thompson initiated Call to Action, which incorporated a number of reforms into a cohesive map for boosting academic performance by the year 2000. It is due for its first interim review this spring, and preliminary reports are that the results have been uneven.

Call to Action includes measures such as ensuring all students can read by the end of third grade, enrolling most students in middle-school algebra classes and moving bilingual education students into mainstream English courses after five years.

The district also is under threat of being broken into smaller districts, after recent state legislation reduced the number of signatures required to qualify such a measure for the ballot.

Several groups are seeking to secede from the district, publicizing the bureaucratic difficulties they have encountered. Last month a South-Central group filed the first breakup application under the new law.

Thompson expressed optimism that the reforms he started can be continued by any successor.

The 14 months notice will allow the school board to conduct a wide search, board President Slavkin said, and to involve the local community more than was possible in the last two superintendent searches, both of which had to be conducted on shorter timelines.

But speculation Monday focused on Thompson’s right-hand man, Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias, 66, whose history with the district also is long and varied.

Zacarias and Thompson were co-deputies in 1992 when then-Supt. Bill Anton resigned. The two competed for the superintendent position, and Thompson elevated Zacarias to a sole deputy role when he gained the top job.