ELECTIONS / TORRANCE SCHOOL BOARD : 2 Incumbents Run on Expertise Against 3 Advocates of Change

By DEBORAH SCHOCH

Oct. 17, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

When David Sargent and Owen Griffith ran for reelection to the Torrance school board in 1987, the outcome was never in doubt.

Not one challenger emerged against the two incumbents, who recaptured their seats without any need for campaigning or defending their records.

But this year, faced with three opponents, Griffith and Sargent are busily printing new campaign brochures, shaking hands and attending candidates’ forums.

The opposition does not spring from any single issue galvanizing residents of South Bay’s largest school district. No single theme dominates the debate. Instead, the campaign is raising a smorgasbord of issues--from the traditional, such as class size and the sale of old school sites, to the novel, such as one candidate’s call for AIDS testing for student wrestlers.

The three challengers are running on their own, not as a slate. Even so, they do agree on one thing: that a fresh viewpoint is needed on the board that oversees the 20,000-student Torrance Unified School District.

The current five-member board is “rubber-stamping what the administration wants. It’s a kind of good-old-boy thing,” said one of the challengers, Robert Thompson, 50, a Hughes Aircraft engineer.

But board President Sargent bristles at that depiction. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that I am independent. I do my homework,” he said.

The statements sum up the debate in the Nov. 5 election. It is a contest between old and new. The incumbents portray themselves as seasoned and knowledgeable; the challengers, as a new guard attempting to inject a stale process with fresh ideas.

Griffith, 63, is a management consultant who works with school districts and cities. He points to his 24 years on the board as an asset, especially today, when austere fiscal times in California education require intimate knowledge of how school budgets work. The challengers lack that experience, he said.

“There’s no way they can understand it until they’ve been through it a few times and made a few mistakes,” Griffith said.

Sargent, 53, an eight-year incumbent and a TRW systems engineer, also stresses his experience. He believes the district leadership has improved over the past decade, fostering a new era of harmony among administrators, teachers and parents. He is the only one of the five candidates to win the recommendation of the Torrance Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 900 teachers, librarians and other employees.

“Even with the difficult financial situation,” Sargent said. “We’re operating with a balanced budget and . . . a credible program within the constraints” of state aid cutbacks.

The challengers, however, are anything but satisfied with the status quo.

T. Andrew Beck, 43, is a former high school teacher and tutor who is now a consultant on pollution control issues. He is proposing an unusual approach to funding schools at a time of reduced state aid: the merging the Torrance district with six smaller South Bay school districts--including those now serving the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach cities.

“P.V. has lost so many students. They’re down to one high school . . . . They should be part of the Torrance school district,” said Beck, who believes the massive merger would save the districts millions of dollars annually in administrative costs.

A second challenger, Paul O’Brien, 42, is a respiratory care practitioner at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He was moved to run in part, he said, because of his concern about class size.

For example, he said, his daughter’s sixth-grade class has about 40 students--a number he calls “ridiculous.” And during a recent visit, he said, he watched her science teacher deal with a roomful of students using microscopes: “That teacher was hopping like a frog from microscope to microscope to microscope . . . (and) all these eager students were calling out her name--’Over here, look what I’ve found!’ . . . She had too many kids and too much to do. It was scary.”

Thompson, the third challenger, is a longtime leader of the Madrona Homeowners Assn. He, too, is concerned that classes have grown too large. He also criticizes the district for selling 10 of the 15 schools it has closed in the past two decades. The district, he said, would have been better served if the properties had been rented on long-term leases.

“It would be income, not only for the students in school now, but it would be money coming in for my grandkids,” Thompson said. “And the district would still have the property.”

But Griffith counters that the school board studied many options and sought community input before selling the empty schools. Some money from the sales has been used for much needed renovations at several remaining schools, he said.

Still, the issue of school closures remains a sensitive one for parents who fear an ongoing district study of the remaining 28 schools could portend the shutting down of another campus.

But the incumbents--as well as Supt. Edward J. Richardson--call that unlikely.

Sargent, in fact, speculates that as enrollment creeps upward, the district may need to reopen one of its closed schools.

Both Griffith and Sargent lauded the district’s approach to dealing with the changing ethnic makeup of Torrance, where the number of non-English-speaking students has grown significantly in recent years.

“It’s a very great challenge,” Griffith said. “I think we’re doing an excellent job under the financial straits that we have.”

But O’Brien said that non-English-speaking children in kindergarten through fourth grade should be getting more individual attention as they learn English.

Another issue dividing the incumbents and challengers is public accountability.

Too often, Thompson said, people are elected to the board on promises they later ignore. Once elected, Thompson said, “(They) do what they think is best for us, rather than what we want them to do.” For example, he said, the incumbents promised to try to reduce class size, but voted to increase the size of classes during budget-cutting last winter.

Although the move was reversed when the budget crunch eased, Thompson said the board should have cut administrative positions before increasing class size.

Challenger O’Brien, meanwhile, wants to encourage public attendance at board meetings, perhaps by having students carry home agendas for coming meetings.

“I don’t think (board members) want a lot of people attending meetings to make decisions tougher,” O’Brien said. He added that he thinks the school administration could do a better job communicating with parents.

He recalled asking for budget information from one school administrator, whom he declined to identify. The administrator did not give him specific answers, instead telling him to attend a board meeting, O’Brien said. He called the response patronizing.

Beck, who ran for the board in 1989 under the name Timothy A. Beck, is also calling for better communication between the district and the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance to assure swift reaction in the case of a refinery accident.

He also thinks the district should fight AIDS more aggressively by requiring student wrestlers to undergo AIDS testing.

“It’s skin-to-skin, sweat-to-sweat contact in wrestling. . . . We should know if there is that virus present,” Beck said. He worries that AIDS could be transmitted if wrestlers have scratches or open sores on their skin. If the wrestler’s parents do not agree to testing, then the student should be banned from wrestling unless the opposing team signs a waiver, Beck said.

(A county expert on acquired immune deficiency syndrome does not think such testing is justified. Dr. Martin Finn, medical director of the AIDS program of the county Department of Health Services, said there was no evidence the HIV virus can be transmitted through sweat. He said the chances were highly unlikely that an open sore or cut of an HIV-positive student could come in contact with an open sore or cut on a wrestling opponent.)

Several other school board candidates said they oppose testing wrestlers for AIDS.

The Candidates

T. Andrew Beck

* Challenger

* Age: 43

* Pollution control consultant

* “The district is run as a fiefdom, a little kingdom. If they like you, it’s fine.”

Owen Griffith

* Incumbent

* Age: 63

* Management consultant, Griffith & Associates

* “We need to build a stronger relationship between business and industry and the schools.”