DISTRICT'S MINE CANARY? WRECKED BATHROOMS A SIGN OF LAUSD'S BIGGER PROBLEMS.

Byline: Paul Douglas White Local View

LOS Angeles schools superintendent Roy Romer recently dealt a lethal blow to the few remaining Angelenos who still have hope in the future of the city's public schools when he announced his plans for cleaning and repairing thousands of vandalized, broken school bathrooms.

Romer was joined for his joyful announcement by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, who plans to send inspectors to campus lavatories and make sure they're up to snuff. As for Romer, he's promised to spend $21 million on the cleanup initiative, which seems encouraging - until you hear the details, take a minute to think about them, and ask yourself a few questions.

Bathrooms don't ``wear out'' that fast; why do so many thousands of them need to be repaired? Because the Los Angeles Unified School District has had a virtual supervision meltdown on its secondary school campuses, letting its students turn countless restrooms into vandalized sewers.

When money is already extremely scarce for education, why are taxpayers - and not the vandals and their families - paying for these repairs?

Once again, it's the supervision issue. In spite of laws that allow vandals to be fined up to $50,000, the LAUSD has lacked the pro-activeness (and moral courage) to catch perpetrators in the act, press charges, and collect damages. The total amount of money the LAUSD has collected from children who vandalized restrooms would probably be less than the change in your pocket. The few who are caught are typically just sent to another LAUSD campus, where, of course, they continue to do more damage.

Secondary schools already have administrators, counselors, teachers, custodians, security guards and school police officers to help with supervision. Why does Romer plan to hire additional ``bathroom attendants'' to supervise the restrooms, instead of just making the numerous present supervisors perform their duties more effectively? And why should the City Attorney's Office need to be involved at all in a matter the school district should - but obviously can't - manage for itself?

Because it's the easy way out, even though it ultimately doesn't work.

Getting site administrators, teachers and classified staff to work together and supervise more conscientiously would require Romer to stand up to his huge cadre of site administrators, look them straight in the eye, and say, ``You're not doing your job; your campuses are out of control; your poor supervision is encouraging our bad students and driving away our good ones; and you've either got to change your ways or I'm going to replace you.''

Even though we all yearn for and need that kind of morally courageous leadership in L.A. schools, we've seen no indication from Romer that that's what we have. It's much easier for a leader to pretend that this current problem of students destroying their schools is really no one's fault, and the answer is just more public funds and additional personnel.

We can have spotlessly clean restrooms and beautifully behaving teenagers in our schools. I see both of them every day in a public high school - a Los Angeles area public school - where I teach. At the West Valley Leadership Academy in Canoga Park, the staff doesn't perform magic, we just supervise - relentlessly. We do everything we can to help our students, and maintain very high expectations.

What we do and achieve at our school could be the norm at every public campus in Los Angeles, but for some reason, it's not. We even wrote to Romer personally when we first heard of his commitment to repairing the restrooms and invited him to visit us and get some tips, but he never responded.

Beat-up bathrooms are a canary in the coal mine for a school system. They indicate that something is drastically wrong, and there's a whole lot more trouble coming in many areas - for everyone - if something isn't done quickly. The LAUSD's leadership must realize this, and have the courage to admit that its broken bathrooms are not a call for the Band-Aid approach Romer has outlined for fixing them, but for a long overdue, bold overhaul of their entire system.

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Photo:

Superintendent Roy Romer, left, leads a tour of a bathroom at Mayberry Street Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer