LAUSD CONTINUES ITS CARNIVOROUS WAYS.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I see that new construction is under way in NoHo; that's North Hollywood. They've renamed the Burbank airport for Bob Hope, making it BoHo. Traffic keeps getting worse across the Valley, making us all NoGo. And Superintendent Roy Romer is now defending the Los Angeles Unified School District's bureaucratic arrogance, using language I guess you'd call RoBlow.

The LAUSD is a carnivorous institution that eats children and good intentions for breakfast. It is secretive, narcissistic and paranoid. The politicians can't fix it. The public can't change it. Half the time, even its own bureaucrats don't know what it's doing.

Case in point: About a billion years ago, the citizens of Los Angeles passed a bond measure to provide the LAUSD with money to repair leaky ceilings, missing lights, damaged bathrooms and peeling paint. Having passed the measure, the citizens assumed the problems were solved.

It now appears that the LAUSD did it again by not doing it. There are persistent complaints from parents that the LAUSD didn't fix the bathrooms and won't replace the people who didn't fix them. It's as if the money can't be wasted; the LAUSD simply refuses to spend it.

In response to these complaints, Los Angeles' ever-responsive mayor, James Hahn, took some time from fund raising for his re-election to order the Department of Building and Safety to inspect the public schools.

I was shocked - not shocked that Hahn was dipping his toes into yet another issue, of course. Jimmy's toes are positively pruny from all the issues he's dipped them into, and yet he never seems to get wet.

Hahn pledged to stop the Chandler Bus Way across the Valley. It's under construction. He pledged to stop the Sunshine Canyon Landfill. It's expanding. He pledged to treat the Valley equally. Case closed. And now he has pledged to pry open the LAUSD. Another pledge. What a shock.

No, I was truly shocked by the idea that Building and Safety hasn't been inspecting our schools all along! But the very idea of public inspection of public schools runs up against the bureaucratic belief that the public just mucks things up.

LAUSD spokeswoman Stephanie Brady was offended: ``If they got into citations, that might be something we'd look into.''

She was threatening to sue the city if the city tried to cite the LAUSD for safety violations! In schools! The Department of Building and Safety inspects churches, for God's sake. I guess it's OK to write the Almighty a citation but not the All Massive.

Roy Romer was also blowing smoke. The LAUSD spends $20 million a year on maintenance, said Roy, and if there is a problem at the LAUSD, then the LAUSD will fix it. And he said this with a straight face.

Fix it? Roy, if the LAUSD could fix itself, it wouldn't have hired an ex- governor from Colorado as its new superintendent! Spend $20 million a year on maintenance?

Listen to me, Roy: You should be leading this charge, not trying to control it. But I guess the LAUSD finally wore you down. The lunchroom staff must be putting something in your beef macaroni, some kind of mind-numbing tomato sauce, because clearly, Roy, you've gone over to the dark side.

History teaches us that trusting the LAUSD is like turning your back on a serial killer. You're lucky if you just get your throat slit. I personally am of the opinion that the only way to truly reform the LAUSD is to evacuate its headquarters, then burn the building to the ground. After that, crush the rubble into dust and salt the earth so that nothing will sprout from that spot ever again.

It could work, but I'm not guaranteeing anything.