Zimmer: District headed in the right direction

The Los Angeles Unified School District is facing a potential budget deficit in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Charter schools are drawing kids out of the district, taking state and federal money with them.

Such is the landscape in which Steve Zimmer, president of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education since 2015 and a board member since 2009, is fighting to keep his District 4 seat in the March 7 primary.

And that’s not all: Three other candidates are pushing hard to oust him —  Nick Melvoin, Gregory Martayan and Allison Holdorff Polhill — and the Los Angeles Times endorsed Melvoin in an editorial under the headline “New Voices Needed on Los Angeles Unified School Board.” Melvoin, who, like Zimmer, is Jewish, is the leading challenger.

[Melvoin: ‘New blood, new ideas’ and charter schools]

“Nick is an incredibly smart guy, but he is at ideological extremes in terms of the issues facing the school district,” Zimmer said. “I’m not saying we’re doing well enough, but we are doing better. An honest narrative is: This is a district that is improving.”

Zimmer, 46, said he is prepared to tackle all the current challenges facing the district, including the potential deficit and keeping children in public schools despite the proliferation of charter schools. A strong proponent for bringing quality education to a district in which nearly 80 percent of students come from low-income families and three quarters are Latino, Zimmer also hews closely to his Jewish faith and background.

A frequent critic of charter schools, he nevertheless supported Lashon Academy Charter School when the board approved it in 2013. He said the dual-language school in Van Nuys, which offers classes in English and Hebrew, is “innovative” and “creative.”

“I thought they were innovative, I thought they were legit, and they had a very creative idea and we’ll see how that plays out after five years. That’s what charters are supposed to be, they’re supposed to be incubators for change, supposed to be engines of innovation and some still are, but a lot are just about market share at this point and that’s very disappointing to me,” he said during a recent interview at the Family Source Center in East Hollywood, which provides tutoring, computer access and fresh produce to families and students in need.

Raised in Bridgeport, Conn., and a graduate of Goucher College in Baltimore, Zimmer said he speaks “liturgy Hebrew” and that his Hebrew skills are inferior to his Spanish-speaking abilities. Still, he is modest about his Spanish.

“I just did an hour of a parent conference in Spanish, but I would never consider myself fluent. I couldn’t talk to you about, like, buying a house in Spanish, right?” he said. “I could talk to you about your kids’ counseling situation in Spanish.”

Zimmer attends services regularly at Temple Beth Am and spends the High Holy Days at B’nai David Judea. Unlike other elected officials who shul-hop during the High Holy Days and show up as an elected official, Zimmer said he prefers to keep a low profile during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

“Sometimes I see other elected [officials], I won’t mention them by name, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I was at eight shuls on Rosh Hashanah.’ I’m like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ ” he said.

Zimmer’s excitement about Judaism extends into his professional life. In 2010, he led an effort to name a Canoga Park school after Stanley Mosk, the late Jewish California Supreme Court justice who became the first Jew to hold statewide office as state attorney general.

“That was a great moment of being a board member,” Zimmer said. “There’s a lot of not-so-great moments. That was a great moment.”

Before his election to the school board, Zimmer was a Teach for America corps member and taught English as a Second Language at John Marshall High School in Los Feliz. After a few years there, he became more involved in working with at-risk students. This introduced him to the world of counseling. Eventually, he became involved with community organizing and, finally, he opted to run for office.

“I have very little formal training in anything I’ve done,” he said. “I came into teaching before I knew how to teach; I started counseling before I knew how to counsel. I did community organizing before I knew what community organizing was. I certainly was elected to the school board before I had any idea what that was really about.”

Some of his achievements as a board member include authoring a school board resolution in support of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which provides a pathway to citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, and developing a program to dispatch district staff members to find dropouts and bring them back into the LAUSD system.

He is known for committing himself to poverty-stricken and at-risk students, sometimes to the neglect of students living in wealthier neighborhoods, and has strong support from United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union. He denounced making teachers’ jobs tied to students’ test scores and teacher evaluations and said he is interested in a more holistic approach when determining who is and who is not an effective educator.

“The bottom line is: People I don’t want in front of my kids are the people who don’t believe in our kids,” he said. “If you have a deficit of will, I can’t address that. If you have a deficit of skill, we can address that.”

He represents a district that includes Fairfax Senior High School, Lanai Road Elementary, Palisades Charter High School, University High School and Venice High School. There are more than 660,000 students currently enrolled in LAUSD’s approximately 1,300 schools. District 4 has about 150 of them.

With Latino students composing such a disproportionate share of the student population, Zimmer expressed concern over President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to deport undocumented students.

“I think of it as a real crisis for our community and for the Jewish community. I think it’s a defining moment, and hopefully a uniting moment,” he said. “Because whatever our particular political perspectives are about — gentrification, language, all the different things we could have disagreements about — it’s in our DNA to be worried right now, and to be present with the most vulnerable.”

As the only Jewish kid in his school in Bridgeport, he said, he experienced anti-Semitism and bullying. His father ran a small blueprinting business and he had a close relationship with his maternal grandmother, Sadie Berlin, who was a needle worker in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side. They shaped him into the person he is today, he said.

“We had special bond and I felt like she was able to share her struggle with me; [that was] kind of who she was,” he said of his grandmother. “She was incredibly politically passionate. She was a passionate Zionist. You could not entertain any argument with her around Israel.”

He spoke fondly of his co-workers and of the children at LAUSD schools. In fact, he greeted several people at the Family Source Center with hugs and said he treats his employees, including teachers, bus drivers, custodians — and all L.A. Unified students — as if they are family.

This attitude, he said, is what distinguishes him from his opponents in the race.

“I make instructional decisions, and operational decisions, as if it were my own kids. But I make decisions about our own employees as if they’re my mom and dad,” he said. “That’s what you should expect from me.”