Schools Chief Offers a Record of Unifying

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The superintendent fought tenaciously to narrow the gap between schools that serve the well-to-do and those that serve the poor. He pushed a controversial fix through an unusually divided school board.

But the uproar in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wasn't about an achievement gap. It was about private donations to public schools. Specifically, it was about an educator's insistence on redistributing wealth.

The stand John E. Deasy took on school fundraising illuminates the philosophy he will soon bring to the Washington area as the next schools chief in Prince George's County.

"This was a stake-in-the-ground issue for me," Deasy said yesterday in an interview. "This was about, 'Are we a community or not?' "

A lean man with close-cropped hair and an accent from Boston and Rhode Island, where he grew up, Deasy expanded on his record over breakfast (cottage cheese, wheat toast, bacon and French-press coffee) in a cafe on Wilshire Boulevard while rain pelted palm trees outside.

Interviews in this city with key school board members, union leaders and parent activists confirmed what the Prince George's school board asserted last week when it chose the 45-year-old Deasy: He has a record of mobilizing broad support for his education initiatives.

There appear to be few hardened critics of Deasy's nearly five-year tenure at the helm of a system with 19 campuses and nearly 14,000 students from pre-kindergarten through high school.

The typical signs of a superintendent under fire are missing in Santa Monica-Malibu Unified. No one on the school board disparages Deasy. The president of the teachers union said he respects him as an institutional adversary. The community has rallied twice in recent years to vote for tax increases -- by overwhelming majorities -- to support the schools. Santa Monica and Malibu also have increased city funding for schools.

But the "equity fund" debate of 2003-04 sticks out.

"He went through a very difficult year," said Linda Gross, a Santa Monica mother who runs a foundation that supports the school system. "People were very angry, throwing tantrums, screaming and yelling. But he didn't budge."

The issue Deasy confronted is, in some ways, analogous to what he might face in Prince George's. Like the county, the communities within this district have pockets of wealth and poverty.

In California, school funding is heavily constrained by a statewide property tax limit. Parents often step in to fill the void through PTA fundraisers and booster clubs. At one Malibu school, Deasy found that the annual giving amounted to more than $900 per pupil. At a Santa Monica school, the donations totaled about $30 per pupil.