1 SCHOOL DIDN'T GET INITIAL CALL.

Byline: Terri Hardy Daily News Staff Writer

It was a confident acting Superintendent Ruben Zacarias who stepped before the cameras at a news conference Wednesday to declare everything under control, that the district stopped serving tainted fruit cups within 24 hours of the first warning.

``Friday morning we ordered that those foods be returned to the warehouse - and in fact we did prevent some people being potentially exposed to the virus,'' Zacarias said.

Everyone, that is, but the kids and faculty at Mount Vernon Middle School in the Crenshaw area. Lost or forgotten in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, they ate the berries at breakfast and lunch Monday.

A district-organized ``phone tree'' - through which cafeteria managers were expected to alert their colleagues at the 46 effected schools - failed to notify Mount Vernon on Friday, the Daily News has learned.

So the school unknowingly served up the tainted fruit cups Monday.

``They were extra,'' said Assistant Principal Vertia Wright. ``They were served to students in the morning and to teachers during lunch.''

Although the district said it had sent out confidential warnings to all principals Monday, Wright said she got her alert via fax Tuesday. The school's food manager, Mae Fields, also was told Tuesday - when district and health officials held a news conference and word of the hepatitis scare was breaking across the country.

On Wednesday, LAUSD officials conceded that they had a notification problem.

``Obviously, the person responsible for notifying Mount Vernon on Friday did not follow up,'' said spokesman Bill Rivera. ``There will be a revision of the phone tree policy to make sure nothing like this happens again. They'll be told to continue phone calls until someone is reached.''

No one at the district could say with certainty Wednesday how many people had eaten the fruit Monday at Mount Vernon.

A series of interviews with district officials Wednesday revealed an inadequate notification system and a bureaucratic response to the imminent crisis that one board member characterized as sluggish.

Board of Education member David Tokofsky said full notification should have been made sooner to allow the district to fully mobilize.

``The district is at its best when there's a clear crisis,'' Tokofsky said. ``But someone has to define it as a crisis. Priceless hours were lost if the district didn't have a chance to be at its best.''

District officials acknowledged that a high-ranking official in the purchasing department was given the lot number of the suspect strawberries by state investigators as early as March 27.

Although district personnel discretely warned officials at 46 schools where the fruit had been shipped not to serve the desert, they did not tell them the nature of the problem, and apparently missed informing Mount Vernon.

Then they waited over the weekend to inform Zacarias, the district's acting chief.

``We're going to be looking into our entire communication process,'' said Brad Sales, district spokesman. ``The deputy superintendent wasn't notified over the weekend, and that should have happened.''

The LAUSD's first inclination of a problem came the evening of March 27, according to interviews with state, federal and district officials, when Mas Hori, an official with the state health department's food and drug branch put in a ``heads up'' call to LAUSD's George Silva, deputy director of the purchasing branch.

Hori advised Silva that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believed that frozen strawberries might be the cause of an outbreak of hepatitis A in several Michigan schools, Rivera said.

Silva was not available for comment Wednesday. Rivera, who said he would speak for Silva, said the purchasing deputy got a follow-up fax at 6:45 p.m. March 27 with a copy of the purchasing order for the strawberries.

That showed that strawberries from the same lot that had caused a hepatitis A outbreak in Michigan also had been shipped to the LAUSD.

``That's the lot they were assuming was tainted,'' Rivera said.

Silva, who was alone in his district office so late in the day, decided to go home, Rivera said, and didn't call the district's shipping department to order a halt on all deliveries of the fruit until Friday morning.

By 8:30 a.m., Silva and his staff had identified the 46 schools that had received previous shipments. A phone tree was initiated in which purchasing employees call designated cafeteria managers, who in turn call other cafeteria managers to pass the word.

Here is where Mount Vernon fell through the cracks, Rivera said.

Moreover, he said the warning cafeteria managers were given was intentionally vague because Hori had urged Silva and his people not to cause a panic by letting on the nature of the crisis. Cafeteria managers were told simply to put the strawberry-blueberry cups on hold until further notice.

The cafeteria managers were not told that their fruit could be tainted.

``(The state) advised him not to do anything to create a panic,'' Rivera said.

Efforts to reach Hori on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Official confirmation about the Michigan outbreak and problems in California came to Silva in a fax Saturday, Rivera said. Again, he got another ``heads up'' call Saturday that a letter from the CDC detailing the problem was being faxed to his office, Rivera said.

No one outside the purchasing department - including district health officials - would be briefed about the possible hepatitis A problem until Monday morning.