LAUSD HIRES SCANDAL TARGET EX-N.Y. FACILITIES BOSS GETS SAME JOB IN L.A.Byline: David R. Baker Staff Writer The new head of Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. Unified School District's troubled effort to get schools built resigned from a similar post in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of after criticism that his division signed overpriced o·ver·price tr.v. o·ver·priced, o·ver·pric·ing, o·ver·pric·es To put too high a price or value on. overpriced Adjective costing more than it is thought to be worth Adj. leases - a scandal one Manhattan tabloid dubbed the ``Lease Fleece.'' Robert Buxbaum will take over next week as interim general manager of facilities for Los Angeles Unified, working to reform a department under fire for its inability to get more campuses. In 1996, Buxbaum resigned as chief executive of facilities for New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. schools after reports that the district poorly managed and paid too much for leases on buildings to use as schools. In one case cited by the New York Daily News New York Daily News Morning daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. It was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson and his cousin Robert McCormick as a subsidiary of the Tribune Co. of Chicago. The first successful tabloid-format newspaper in the U.S. , school authorities leased a building from a dance company that didn't own it. Los Angeles school The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement emerged during the mid-1980s, loosely based at the University of Southern California and UCLA, that poses a challenge to the dominant Chicago School of Urbanism. officials claim Buxbaum was the scandal's fall guy and the leases were approved by the New York Board of Education before he was hired there. Buxbaum and his new employers attribute his premature departure from New York to his repeated warnings to officials there that they needed to spend more money to make crumbling school buildings safe. ``My understanding of the whole thing is that he was made a scapegoat for giving straight-forward advice, and he really deserved credit for being so blunt,'' said Howard Miller Howard Miller may refer to
The officer of a firm responsible for day-to-day management, usually the president or an executive vice-president. of Los Angeles Unified. Buxbaum will work in Los Angeles from March 8 through June 30, helping to reshape the facilities department and its program to build desperately needed schools. He will receive a total of $150,000, including all housing and travel expenses, Miller said. Buxbaum was recommended for the job by Ramon C. Cortines, who used to head New York City schools and now serves as Los Angeles' interim superintendent. ``Mr. Buxbaum brought order out of the chaos of the facilities department in New York,'' Cortines said Wednesday. Buxbaum said the lease program already was under way when he arrived in the New York City school system. Although it wasn't his idea, he publicly defended the program. He still does. The lease program wasn't managed properly, he said Wednesday, but it actually saved the New York district money in the end. Many of the sites for which the school system signed 15-year leases in the mid-1990s have since more than doubled in price, he said. And the program helped quickly house more students. ``What I was defending was our ability to create seats for kids,'' Buxbaum said. Miller, however, expressed little hope that the idea would work here, even though some Los Angeles Unified officials have informally suggested leases as a way to ease chronic overcrowding overcrowding overcrowding of animal accommodation. Many countries now publish codes of practice which define what the appropriate volumetric allowances should be for each species of animal when they are housed indoors. Breaches of these codes is overcrowding. . Earthquake safety requirements make leasing commercial buildings for schools much more difficult in California than it is in New York, where such rules don't exist. ``It's an option, but I don't think it's one that will pan out,'' Miller said. Buxbaum said his chief responsibility in Los Angeles will be to fit the facilities department into Cortines' proposed reorganization of the entire school district, which would carve the 711,000-student system into 11 semiindependent pieces. |
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