For Romer, it's all work

Early mornings and late nights. At 77, the former governor finds the job's not finished before he leaves L.A.'s school district 'to do one more thing'

David Montero, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 20, 2006 at midnight

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LOS ANGELES - It's a simple truth - the reason Roy Romer hates the treadmill in his office is because it takes him nowhere.

Nobody has actually seen him use it in the four years it's been there, even though family and friends beg the 77-year-old to exercise. But it's likely that with about four months left as superintendent of the nation's second-largest school district, the treadmill won't suddenly get his attention.

"If it's real work, well, I love to work my body to where it's absolutely exhausted," he said. "But the manufactured work of these machines is hard for me."

Real work.

It's what Romer said he lives for - so much so that when asked how he pictures retirement, the answer would make John Calvin seem slothlike. "I don't know how to sit on a boat and cruise. I just don't know how to do that," he said. "I was raised in Holly, Colorado. In the country, you don't learn how to golf, and I don't know how to play tennis. I don't know how to do anything leisurely. I know how to work."

Dealing with a 'rock star mayor'

It's tough to believe this is where one of the most powerful men in the state lives.

The apartment is spare - a couch and two tall stereo speakers dominate the only room that isn't a bedroom or kitchen. His wife, Bea, alternates two weeks each month here and two at the family residence in Colorado.

On the counter, a pre-printed envelope from former Vice President Al Gore rests beside a few bills. The walls and shelves are dominated by white paint, a standard scheme in Southern California. Two pictures hang in the narrow hallway, each frame filled with dozens of smiling members of the Romer family. A Van Gogh print is on a far wall beyond a small television.

But it's what's past the large windows that shatter any thoughts that a college-aged bachelor lives here.

Romer carefully guides himself down the stairs and opens the door that puts him directly on the sand. A few seagulls glide through the gray marine layer and above the rhythmic crashing of waves. A jogger with a dog breezes by and neither glances at Romer standing there in a salmon-colored shirt, dark tie and slacks.

The superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District is on his cell phone. It's 7:30 a.m. and he's already taken about a half-dozen phone calls related to another salvo fired by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that ripped the district for continuing to fail kids while also calling for an audit.

He finishes the call, slowly climbs back up the stairs, his hands steadying himself against the walls. A golden retriever bounds in from the street, followed by an older man with a hearing aid. It's Romer's neighbor, Irv Bush. When he gets wind of the mayor's comments, Bush seethes.

"He's an idiot," Bush said.

Romer laughs, but doesn't engage - although he does refer to Villaraigosa as a "rock star mayor." It's going to be a long day - the first of about 16 hours spent putting out political fires, juggling school district finances and working through a Byzantine array of meetings.

Outside in the alley, Romer's driver waits to whisk him off in the silver Crown Victoria that's been his car for the last three years. Carrying the tattered brown leather briefcase that he's had for 40 years, the superintendent climbs in the back seat. His phone rings again. Another radio reporter wants a response to Villaraigosa's attack. Romer obliges.

In the 20-minute ride to breakfast at Jerry's Famous Deli in Westwood via side streets, driving past strip malls and billboards in several languages, he will take three more calls, shuffling through charts showing Academic Performance Index scores have shot up 197 points in the past five years and telling anyone who will listen that he's happy to have an audit as long as the district doesn't have to pay for it.

After six years on the job, the attacks are withering.

"I have never been criticized as much in my life as I have been here," said Romer, who'll be back in Denver today to address an Amendment 2 anniversary rally. "I mean, it's daily and weekly.

"Every time there's a riot on one of these campuses, I'm the guy responsible. I mean, I've got 30 gangs on one of my high school campuses and so they have a rumble at noon and it's, 'Romer, you can't keep discipline in your schools.' It's just the way it is. It's like the weather - you just live in it."

When Romer walks into the deli and sits down, he orders the pancakes ("I don't care how many you charge me for, but just give me one"), a poached egg, turkey sausage and skim milk.

He said he never intended to stay on the job this long, but there's so much work to do, he thought he'd better stick around to see it through. And when he decided to leave the job this fall, it was a subtle nod to aging. Ronni Ephraim, chief instructional officer at the district, said she thinks Romer made a calculated decision.

"I think he wants to do one more thing," she said. "I think he had to make a tough choice - stick around here for two years and let it be his last or do one more thing that is important in his life."

Romer doesn't disagree. It's just that he's not exactly sure what - or where - that one more thing is.

Steering driver back to school

Los Angeles Unified School District, by most accounts, is a beast. It's 727,117 students spanning 700 square miles and encompassing 26 cities - compared with 780,708 students in the entire state of Colorado. Logistically, Romer said nothing could have prepared him for that kind of scope.

"Somebody says, 'Hey I'm principal of this school - will you come out and visit me?' You think, 'That's an easy thing to do,' " Romer said. "Well, there are 900 of them - that's three years in terms of doing one per day."

The difficulty of traversing the vast district is why he chuckled when the local valley newspaper threatened a critical story of him having his own driver. He said he needs one because the back seat is an office where he works while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

His driver, Manny Covarrubias, 42, darts through small open spaces between slow cars to gain seconds on a half-hour trip to the UCLA Medical Center for a routine checkup on Romer's ankle. Covarrubias has been his driver since Romer arrived in 2000.

He calls Romer one of his closest friends. Romer calls him extended family. Covarrubias, a slight man with a dark moustache and thick accent, started with the school district in 1991 as a school bus driver and was temporarily assigned to Romer on his first day as superintendent.

A few days later, he remembers Romer asking how he would keep him permanently when more tenured drivers were grumbling about it.

"I said, 'Governor, excuse my French, but this is a bunch of B.S., you know,' " he said. "What you say goes. You're the superintendent, what you say goes."

It went - under one condition set by Romer. He told Covarrubias he had to go back to school.

The thought terrified Covarrubias. A graduate of Garfield High School, he had never considered college. But Romer told him to take classes and if there was ever a conflict with the job, he'd figure out a way to get around Los Angeles without him.

"I started at the lowest level of English," he said. "Today, I have a physics class."

This fall, Covarrubias is transferring to California State University, Los Angeles after completing two years at community college. He figures in a few years he'll get his degree in kinesiology so he can teach physical education in school. Driving, he said, was a way to pay the bills. Education, he said, is a way to a life. It's what Romer taught him.

"He's a busy man," Covarrubias said sitting outside UCLA waiting for Romer to emerge. "But I told him when I graduate, I will find out where he is and show him my degree."

Romer said there's no need for that - he plans to attend that graduation.

And he'll drive himself.

Using books as practical lessons

Roy Romer never sits at his desk. He's got gangs to worry about, construction budgets to digest, and he navigates a district that counts more than 80 languages among its schools.

A long boardroom table surrounded by about a dozen black chairs is where he prefers to conduct business. He'll move about to different chairs, leaning back and forward, spinning around and clasping his hands behind his head.

He'll stand up, lean against the table and stretch his legs and back while people are talking. Every once in awhile, if time permits, he'll go to a couch near the back of his office and take a five-minute nap. It's a technique he's used dating back to his three terms as Colorado governor.

"It's how I stay recharged," he said. "Some days - I know exactly what it is - it's when I read too much at night. If I read a half hour, I'm OK. If I read two hours, then I've taken too much time. I need to have that sleep."

The night before, the seven-member school board had its bimonthly meeting and it went for a semiroutine nine hours - wrapping up around 9 p.m. He stayed up to do some work and read a chunk of The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. He didn't read too long that night, he said.

Late nights are typical. Monday, he didn't get home until close to 10 p.m. because each week he records A Conversation with Roy Romer on local public television. He said he has insomnia and often wakes up at 2 a.m. and reads books - he has two or three going at a time. Romer said it's a way to clear his head.

Stephanie Brady, the district spokeswoman who has been with Romer since he arrived and is preparing to leave this summer, said he uses the books as practical lessons throughout the day. He'll often refer to a book he read to explain a problem to staffers who, in turn, will scramble to find a copy of the book to read.

Romer said it happened last week while reading Rick Atkinson's World War II history An Army at Dawn. The district's progress, he thought, could be measured in a parallel to what he'd read.

"When we invaded North Africa, our Army was in bad shape," Romer recalled. "Eisenhower had to go through and kind of remove 80 percent of the people who were in the squadron level - they were just not competent. It took a long while to build that Army up and get ready for Italy and get ready for Europe. It's similar to the school district. We were really down and we're building it back up."

Razing hotel where RFK died

Ken Bernstein wishes Romer's ambition to build up schools didn't include tearing down historical landmarks in Los Angeles - a fight that pitted Romer against local historians, Hollywood actors and Sirhan Sirhan.

The director of preservation issues at the Los Angeles Conservancy remembered meeting Romer last year while they were locked in a fight to save The Ambassador Hotel from being demolished to make way for a school.

"He had just had surgery on his foot and was wheeled into our meeting to tell us he was not going to consider the plan (the conservancy wanted to transform the hotel into a school) and he would see us in court," Bernstein said.

Built in 1921, the Ambassador was the site of six Oscar ceremonies, was home to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and hosted every president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon.

But it was mostly known for June 5, 1968, when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.

"The hotel itself was so far gone it wasn't usable as a structure and it was a value judgment - the value judgment was, 'Hey, you haven't done right by your kids before - we're going to do right by them before we leave here,' " Romer said.

It wasn't an easy fight.

"I had Diane Keaton on my butt. I had everybody suing me."

The Los Angeles Conservancy filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to preserve the landmark. Sirhan sued, claiming that it couldn't be destroyed because it was evidence he needed for his appeal. Romer won both cases.

The hotel was razed in January. A billboard proclaims, "Future Home of Central Los Angeles New Learning Center." It is scheduled to be built by 2009.

Bernstein complained Romer played political hardball to get it done.

"I don't think he ever understood the depth of concern in the Los Angeles community about preserving the Ambassador and what the Ambassador had meant to generations of Angelenos," he said. "It didn't help that he didn't have a deep reservoir of experience in Southern California."

Doesn't care about his legacy

When all is said and done, Romer will be responsible for spending $19.2 billion in bonds and state matching funds on approximately 150 schools - 55 completed in his six years. Most everyone agrees it will be his legacy.

District board member David Tokofsky, who has been there for the entire Romer tenure, said the legacy is in serious jeopardy, however, because of the mayor's steady barrage of negative attacks on the district.

"It's not his legacy. It's over," Tokofsky said. "Antonio Villaraigosa, if he is successful, will stand next to the new buildings, cut the ribbons, and say 'I'm the one who passed the bonds. I'm the one who built these schools. Yo soy la persona quien construye estas escuelas.' "

Villaraigosa disagreed.

"The mayor has the upmost respect for Roy Romer," spokeswoman Janelle Erickson said, despite his public statements labeling more than 80 percent of middle-school students as being "trapped in failing schools" and saying there is "a culture of complacency in the LAUSD."

Romer said he doesn't care about his legacy - an attribute he said he has acquired with getting older. Sitting in his office sorting through files to go over while eating dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant on the west side of town, he said he does think about how he'll be remembered.

He thinks it will be for building schools, although he wishes it would be for his insistence that the district go to the Open Court reading program of uniform standards coupled with heavy testing.

"I long ago gave up or discounted the legacy issue. Because you're not going to come out of here beloved. The best you can expect is to be respected," he said with a sigh. "I'm also prepared not to get that. And the reason - sometimes life is like that. And that's a difference in my maturity. Earlier in my life that would've bothered me a great deal - it doesn't bother me now."

It should, according to Tokofsky.

He said he saw Romer come to the district clueless about Los Angeles - remembering a surfer joke Romer made when he arrived in 2000.

"That would've been OK if he were Gerald Ford in the 1970s, but this was not a white, blond surfer city anymore. That was over. Anybody could see this was an emerging Latino city and he made the faux pas on Day One to talk about surfing instead of some other metaphor for the town."

Tokofsky, 46, said Romer never understood the difference between Hispanic and Latino, either. In fact, he's not sure the superintendent gets it now. It's one of the difficulties of being an outsider parachuting into a new job, a new community and a new life.

But, he said, Romer has done more for the Latino population than anyone else in Los Angeles.

"You are FDR, Roy. Don't you get it? You have delivered the greatest redistribution of wealth," said Tokofsky, whose district identifies itself as Latino.

"He took the property tax revenue from the wealthiest congressional districts in America and sent them to the newest immigrants and thereby was doing more for the Latino issue than anything the mayor could do."

A little wine, music - and work

The joke among Romer's staff is the treadmill and exercise bike make for good places to hang coats. Covarrubias said he uses the equipment more than Romer does.

Still, Romer said one of his ambitions after leaving the district is to possibly tackle health and obesity issues on an international level. He also thinks he might dive into education issues on the national level while splitting time between Denver and Washington, D.C.

His children worry about his long hours and health. Chris Romer, who is running for the Colorado state Senate, has his father come and stump for him once a month.

"He's a young bull in an old bull's body," he said, adding that he would like to see him cut back a bit.

Mark Romer, the oldest of Romer's seven children, said his dad thrives on activity.

"It keeps him young and keeps him mentally agile," he said. "I wish he would would go to nine hours a day instead of 12 and exercise a little more, but it's what he wants to do, and he usually does what he wants to do."

Covarrubias tries to get him to exercise, too. They signed up for a gym membership a couple of years ago and his driver said he went once.

Romer laughed as he gathered his belongings in his office at 7 p.m. He was headed to dinner to finish up about 20 items - including trying to fix a $2 billion budget shortfall.

He said he'd have a glass of wine, work through the meal - appetizers only - and get home around 10 p.m. He might listen to some Bob Dylan or some jazz on his prized high fidelity stereo system. He would read a book.

He would get up at 5:30 a.m. the next morning, get his schedule, and start the cycle all over again just like he's done for the past six years - moving forward in the same place.

Roy Romer

The last 20 years

• Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent from 2000-2006

• Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1997-1999

• Governor of Colorado from 1986-1998 - the state's last three-term governor

At Los Angeles Unified School District

• Under his tenure, approval for more than $19 billion in new school construction. A total of 55 schools have been built in his six years there, and the total planned will be about 150.

• Raised Academic Performance Index test scores by 197 points during the past five years while statewide the increase was 126 points

• Today, 96 percent of elementary schools have an API over 600. Before his arrival, 27 percent reached that level.

A tale of two school districts

Comparison between Los Angeles Unified School District and Denver Public School District and some Colorado figures:

• TOTAL STUDENTS

LAUSD: 727,117

Colorado statewide: 780,708

DPS: 73,018

• TOTAL EMPLOYEES

LAUSD: 77,754

DPS: 13,452

• TOTAL SCHOOLS