Incumbent Scott Schmerelson and his challenger Dan Chang shared on Wednesday, Sept. 25, their top priorities, concerns and visions for the future of Los Angeles Unified School District 3 during the candidate forum debate hosted by the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization.
The two are running for the seat on LAUSD’s seven-member school board to represent District 3 in the West San Fernando Valley, stretching from North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys to Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Woodland Hills and West Hills.
Seven LAUSD board members oversee the nation’s second-largest school district, with more than 538,000 students enrolled. LAUSD is also the county’s second-largest employer with more than 74,000 teachers and other employees.
LAUSD board Member Scott Schmerelson talks with new students Kayla Madell, 5, and Annibell Kim,5, as they wait for the start of their class at Germain Academy in Chatsworth, CA, Monday, August 14, 2023. Monday was the first day of classes for the new year at LAUSD. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Schmerelson was born in Philadelphia and earned his B.A. in foreign language education from Temple University in Pennsylvania. He served as an assistant principal at Griffith Middle School in East Los Angeles for five years and then as principal at Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth for five years.
Chang is a middle school math teacher and a graduate of UC Berkeley and the UCLA Anderson School of Management. A father of three children at LAUSD, he teaches at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood. In 2012, he co-founded the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, which engaged artists to support LAUSD arts education programs.
During Wednesday’s debate hosted on Zoom both candidates were asked how to improve the quality of education at LAUSD schools.
Schmerelson said that nearly 85% of LAUSD students live below the poverty level which creates challenges for teachers and students.
“A lot of these kids are missing school because they either have to go to the doctor with their parents or they have to translate for their mom and dad,” Schmerelson said.
LAUSD offers assistance from therapists, social workers and counselors who “make sure that our kids are coming to school, have what they need and are learning. We offer a free breakfast, free lunch… So we make sure the kids are fed in LAUSD,” Schmerelson said.
Chang said to improve the quality of education, LAUSD needs new leadership, and “someone who will go into the budgets and will look at each elementary school and do what’s necessary to protect their funding, so they can have these programs that parents, like myself, really want to see for our kids.”
Chang criticized the district’s bureaucracy, saying, “One of the things that happens in L.A. Unified, and I see it as a parent, is that we’re not getting enough of (arts, robotics and sports) programs. Part of the reason that happens is because of the downtown bureaucracy that illegally siphoned money away from local schools.”
John Walker, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, or WHHO, who moderated the debate, asked if the LAUSD budget has been managed properly. With its $18.4 billion budget, he said, the district could afford to pay every teacher “a fortune” and rebuild classrooms every year.
But Schmerelson argued that the budget pays not just for teachers but also for school maintenance, psychiatric social workers, school police and other employee expenses.
“We have an enormous budget,” he said. “We also have an enormous number of kids to educate with a lot of problems. … All these other people were there every single day in the trenches working with kids to make sure that they are successful at school.”
But Chang responded, “We fundamentally have to cut the bureaucracy, get our money back to our schools, get decision-making back, and no more of these district mandates. And then you’ll see the programs, the math and reading scores take off.”
LAUSD has about 900 schools, according to Schmerelson. He said schools in District 3 are “performing very, very well. And our parents show in surveys a sense of contentment with the schools and how they’re being run,” he said.
Chang saw room for improvement, saying it is important to boost students’ math and reading skills. And he said the district needs to provide more safety on campuses. “Let’s get more school police back on campuses so that we can make our students feel safe so they can learn again,” Chang said.
Chang accused Schmerelson of voting to cut the school police budget by $25 million in February 2021. But Schmerelson said he asked a board secretariat to look at the records and “see where I didn’t approve school police dung my carer. And the answer was he couldn’t find it.”
WHHO President Walker moderated the debate and said his members want to see a better quality of education in West Valley schools.
“If we don’t have good quality of education it’s adversely affecting the community because it’s not attracting young people to come into our community,” Walker said. “They don’t want to go to the schools. They want to send their kids off to Calabasas or some other locations.”
With the ambitious plan by Rams owner Stan Kroenke for the Warner Center that seeks to develop thousands of new units, hotels, offices and a stadium, Walker said, the area would attract many families with children who will need good schools.
“If those developments come to fruition with all those apartments, we want to attract young people with children, so we can have that ability to be able to advance, expand and upgrade the community.”
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