ELECTIONS INGLEWOOD UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT : McCloud's Fiery Style Is Key Issue; Hill-Hale Favored in Separate Race

By MARC LACEY

March 22, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Zyra McCloud has made combativeness and confrontation the hallmarks of her tenure as an Inglewood school trustee, all in the name of a better education for the community’s children.

Now she is facing two challengers in a districtwide reelection campaign in which her very style is the chief issue--from her screaming at school board meetings and her participation in student walkouts to her public calls for the school superintendent’s resignation.

“I can get things done the Zyra McCloud way,” the former parent activist said last year. “I’m not worried about my office. Take the office. The Zyra McCloud way is combative, fiery. The Zyra McCloud way is to get their attention and force them to work for the people and the children.”

McCloud’s official activism and full-time commitment to the schools has won praise from those whose causes she has supported: Latino parents complaining of racial insensitivity by the school board, high school students protesting dirty bathrooms and outdated textbooks, teachers picketing for a bigger pay raise, among others.

But she has rubbed some in the Inglewood Unified School District the wrong way.

Three of her four school board colleagues are endorsing one of McCloud’s opponents because McCloud acts more like a “parent activist than a board member,” said board member Thomasina Reed.

Supt. George McKenna, meanwhile, has complained of McCloud’s “offensive behavior and profane language.”

On April 2, McCloud and school board President Lois Hill-Hale are seeking reelection in separate races to four-year terms in the county’s 13th-largest school district. Although Hill-Hale is considered a strong favorite against perennial candidate Mildred McNair, McCloud confronts fierce opposition from two active parents, Loystene Irvin and Sandra Mack.

McCloud--who as PTA council president was forcibly removed by security guards from a school board meeting in 1985 for speaking out of order--says her activist nature was the reason she was first elected in 1987 and that her volubility was necessary to establish her credibility. She has adopted a more low-key approach at board meetings in recent months, she says, because her colleagues have learned to respect her and her message of community empowerment.

Her colleagues acknowledged that, but they have not forgotten her aggressive ways.

Board member Larry Aubry said he is supporting Irvin because the board needs “folks that will be more team players, people who understand the implications of their behavior.”

Board members Reed and Joseph Rouzan, who are also endorsing Irvin, echoed Aubry’s remarks.

Hill-Hale said she is staying out of the McCloud race because she does not want to alienate supporters in any of the three camps.

In the District 5 race, Irvin, 44, a lay minister, has emerged as McCloud’s chief opponent because she has the backing of three school trustees. Mack, 51, a parent and beauty shop owner, said she is running because she wants to eliminate the “three-ring circus” atmosphere of the current board.

Irvin, who has two children in the district and two others who graduated from Inglewood schools, said she has demonstrated her ability to work with others as the pastor of the House of Prayer Pentecostal Church in Los Angeles and while assisting on volunteer committees at her children’s schools.

“You can’t be an island by yourself,” Irvin said, referring to McCloud’s penchant for casting a lone dissenting vote at board meetings. “You have to work together. You don’t come with the idea you are going to fight.”

Irvin also has accused McCloud of improperly using school district employees to promote a January press conference on the Persian Gulf War, which Irvin charges was actually a McCloud campaign rally. The school board said it is looking into whether the press conference, which featured students and McCloud speaking against the war, violated any district regulations. McCloud vigorously denies it was a campaign ploy.

Mack has a son at Inglewood High School, another who graduated in 1989 and three adult stepsons. She is team mother of Inglewood High’s varsity baseball team and has been active in other school-related and community activities.

Mack said she decided to run when she saw the state achievement scores for the 16,400-student district in the newspaper. Inglewood’s most recent CAP scores placed the district in the 50th percentile for elementary grades and in the bottom 10th percentile for high school seniors, compared to districts with similar socioeconomic characteristics.

“So many of our children come out of high school and are not prepared to go to a four-year college,” Mack said. “I would like to see where the problems are. Our children are the ones that are suffering. I feel like we are letting them down.”

Although she considers herself a friend of McCloud, she said that in contrast to the incumbent she would offer low-key, constructive criticism of the school administration.

Controversy has clung to McCloud throughout her tenure, but even critics acknowledge that her aggressive, confrontational style comes from the best of intentions. Board members Aubry and Rouzan, although campaigning for her defeat, said McCloud is genuinely concerned for the district’s students.

Her clashes with McKenna have been frequent.

She is quick to ask McKenna at meetings whether he has responded to citizens’ complaints or incorporated community viewpoints in his decisions. She often reminds him and the audience that the school board is McKenna’s boss. She also puts her challenges into memos, which only sometimes elicit responses from him.

McKenna, who has taken no public position in the race, last year complained in a memo to the board that McCloud had called him a liar at board meetings and subjected him to obscenities during closed sessions.

McCloud, who supported the hiring of McKenna in 1988, only to become his chief adversary, denied that she used profanity toward McKenna. She said she uses the term liar when the facts are on her side, adding she questions his truthfulness to keep him accountable to the community.

McCloud has been criticized most fiercely by her colleagues for acting as part activist, part board member in what Aubry calls “role confusion.”

But her support for students, pay raises for teachers and her leading role in acting as a board advocate for disgruntled Latino parents has gained her loyalty from members of those groups.

She caused an uproar in November, 1989, when she accompanied a group of parents on a videotaped tour of Morningside High School to highlight deteriorated conditions. McKenna responded by proposing a policy aimed at restricting outsiders from disrupting classes.

When students walked out of Morningside in February, 1990, McCloud lent her support and, some say, even encouraged students to leave class.

“I intend to support the parents and students to close every school in Inglewood if they are not cleaned up,” McCloud said shortly after the Morningside walkouts. “The board has let this community down.”

Rouzan, the board’s vice president, said McCloud overstepped her bounds as a board member in lending support to the Morningside protests.

“I don’t think we do any good when we encourage kids to leave the classroom,” Rouzan said. “They need every minute of education they can get.”

But McCloud said recently that the walkouts were needed to get the board to acknowledge conditions at Morningside. The months after the protests have brought marked improvements to the campus, those at Morningside agree.

McCloud, who declines to give her age, has two daughters at Inglewood High School. Her goals if reelected are to require lesson plans for all classes so substitute teachers can continue the curriculum when filling in and to have evaluation forms at the schools so community members can more easily air their complaints.

Another goal mentioned by McCloud and her two challengers is improving relations between blacks and Latinos in the 20-school district, which covers Inglewood and neighboring Ladera Heights.

Latino parents have complained that board meetings are not held in Spanish and that language difficulties and a lack of bilingual employees stymie their efforts to get involved in the schools.

The district’s Latino population has risen dramatically in recent years, with Latino students now outnumbering blacks 49% to 48%. All five board members are black, as are all the challengers in next month’s election. McCloud was their chief supporter on the board when Latino parents objected last year to a district plan to ease overcrowding through transfers that the parents said concentrated on Latino neighborhoods. The district later rescinded most of those transfers.

In the District 4 race, Hill-Hale, 56, is facing McNair, 49, who has run five unsuccessful campaigns for school board, city clerk and the El Camino College Board of Trustees during the past decade.

McNair, a bilingual teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, criticizes the district leadership for creating “a ghetto school district in a middle-class community.” She says she hopes to improve the district’s reputation so residents will no longer send their children to schools outside Inglewood.

McNair, known for her fiery speeches before the school board and City Council, says being a leader requires the courage to criticize the status quo.

Hill-Hale, elected to the board in 1987, said her primary goal is to improve student test scores by better motivating students, and said she has studied school systems in other cultures in an effort to come up with a solution. She said the district has all the ingredients to provide top-flight education, but “if the student is not motivated to learn there is nothing we can do.”

Hill-Hale criticizes McNair for her confrontational approach and says the big difference between the two of them is her own “proven record of leadership.” She cites as achievements her two board-appointed rotations as school board president and her sponsorship of special programs to prevent students from dropping out and using drugs.

THE CANDIDATES Lois Hill-Hale

Seat 4 incumbent

Age: 56

Occupation: Governmental consultant

Mildred McNair

Seat 4 challenger

Age: 49

Occupation: Teacher

Loystene Irvin

Seat 5 challenger

Age: 44

Occupation: Minister, businesswoman