Marguerite LaMotte seeks re-election to LAUSD board

Voters within the boundaries of the L.A. Unified School District will go cast ballots Tuesday for most of the seven seats on the board of education.

The board’s District 1 stretches from the Palms neighborhood in West Los Angeles to Leimert Park and parts of South L.A.

District 1 contains nearly 100 schools. The 82-year-old Audubon Middle School is one of them.

Herman Floyd has lived across the street from Audubon for a long time. His two daughters enrolled there a couple of decades ago.

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"It was much different than this," says Floyd, "it was much better than what it is now. But it’s improving. It’s improving. Before, you had entertainer’s kids going over here. Tina Turner had a couple of kids going over here for a minute."

Floyd’s planted a “re-elect Marguerite LaMotte” sign on his lawn.

"I know her. I see her at church on occasions and you know, she’s a good friend of mine. I thought I’d do nice and vote for her."

Around the corner, Larry Aubry sits on the steps of Audubon’s auditorium. He’s an education activist and a columnist for the Sentinel newspaper.

He shakes his head when I ask him about the campus. "In some ways it represents, you know, the contradictions and problems really, that we have in inner cities these days. The structure is nice, it’s a very nice neighborhood here in Leimert Park, and so forth, but the achievement level of the students here is way down.

He’s right. Audubon ranks near the bottom in comparison to similar schools. Its Academic Performance Index is about 140 points below the state’s 800-point goal.

Aubry says he’s supporting LaMotte’s only opponent, Eric Lee, because the incumbent’s done little to promote policies that would help this school and the African-American students who need help the most. "I’ve never heard her voting on something that the union, you know, opposed. I’m sorry, I just haven’t. I’m a lifelong union member, lifelong. But when it comes to education the children are first, not the union."

A few weeks ago Marguerite LaMotte, a lifelong teacher and principal, cast the sole vote on the board against balancing the schools’ budget by sending out preliminary layoff notices to thousands of employees. The teachers union opposed the layoffs. Her campaign flyers say she’s demanded accountability and transparency and has fought downtown bureaucrats to eliminate waste.

LaMotte was not available for this story. After three weeks of interview requests, LaMotte’s aides offered a telephone interview at 5 in the afternoon on the Friday before the election.

School’s out at Windsor Hills Elementary, a couple of miles west of Audubon Middle School. Parents here say schools are struggling, but they aren’t taking that anger to the ballot box.

Dwight Johnson’s waiting for his two second grade boys. He knows Marguerite LaMotte’s running against Eric Lee.

Johnson described what went through his mind when deciding who to support. "Because me being a male, I think our situation with the schools needs a little more mothering. And I’m going with that. I’m going to go with her, probably having a little more feminine understanding of the children."

This is a good school struggling under budget cuts, he says, and he worries about the middle and high schools his sons will attend.

Aasiya Bandele also worries. She says Audubon Middle School, her daughter’s neighborhood school, has improved, but that's not where her daughter is going to go.

"No. That’s one of the lower performing schools, she will not go there. No. Just because they’re doing, it’s not good enough. It’s good for what they’re doing now, but it’s not good enough for me to send my daughter there."

She hadn’t made up her mind about her vote in the school board election. When told that United Teachers Los Angeles is backing LaMotte, Bandele says that’s who she’ll vote for.

LaMotte’s raised nearly $50,000 so far. Opponent Eric Lee has raised $30,000.

The teachers union and the SEIU union have spent more than half a million dollars so far to elect LaMotte. No independent organization has spent any money on Lee’s campaign.

"Hi, my name is Eric Lee and I’m running for school board." Lee, who heads the L.A. chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says he entered the race after LaMotte joined the teachers union in opposing a civil rights lawsuit.

A group had sued to stop inordinate budget related layoffs at low-performing schools. "That for a board member in this district, where layoffs occurred, impacting schools by as much as 60 percent of their staff being laid off while other communities might not have other people laid off, and she didn’t support that, it was unconscionable to me."

For now, Lee has the tepid backing of billionaire Eli Broad and some allies of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In L.A. Unified’s District 1, with about 300,000 registered voters, Lee says he hopes his smaller treasury will help generate enough voter support to make this race a real contest.