Mónica García

Seven months out from the primary, L.A. Unified school board member Monica Garcia has already raised nearly 150 times more money than her opponent, including donations from former L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and both charter school and L.A. district employees.

Garcia, seeking her third term on the seven-member board, collected $119,858 in donations between Jan. 1 and June 30, according to the latest campaign finance documents filed with the city Ethics Commission. She has spent about $18,000.

Challenger Carl Petersen has raised $805 and spent $412. Neither candidate responded to requests for comment.

Garcia’s 2013 re-election bid and the two other contested school board races that year received national attention for the large amount of money — $6.16 million — poured into the campaigns by independent expenditure committees, which are not subject to fundraising limits.

About $1.2 million of the independent expenditure money went into Garcia’s race to support her. Independent expenditure committees meanwhile spent $113,000 trying unsuccessfully to defeat her.

She received support in 2013 from a coalition formed by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that donated money to all three school board races and received backing from outside donors like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She raised $504,224 on her own that year and spent $507,032, according to city finance documents. Her closest competitor in the five-way race, Robert Skeels, raised and spent $19,000.

This year, in addition to donations from Deasy and charter and L.A. Unified school educators and officials, Garcia’s contributors so far include philanthropists, film executives, the Los Angeles School Police Management Association PAC, several employee unions, Eli and Edythe Broad, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Garcia, who was board president for an unprecedented six consecutive years, from 2007 to 2013,  has been an advocate of charter schools and sweeping reforms to low-performing schools. She has called for “Diplomas for All” with a goal of 100 percent graduation rate in the district.

“It has been an incredible honor to serve you for the last 10 years; together we have been able to increase graduation and reduce the dropout rate,” Garcia wrote in a letter to supporters earlier this year announcing her re-election bid.  “I am looking forward to continuing our work transforming this district so that all children can learn to read, write, think, believe and be college ready and career prepared. But I need your help to win.”

In the past, Garcia has not been endorsed by the L.A. teachers union, UTLA.

Petersen has said he and his family will move into District 2 specifically to run against her.  District 2 covers East L.A., Pico-Union, downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods and is heavily Latino.

Carl Petersen

On his campaign website, titled Change the LAUSD, Petersen said the board needs a “parent’s perspective.”

“This campaign will not be funded by the California Charter School Association,” he writes. “I will answer to the parents and students of the district, not corporate donors.”

Petersen ran unsuccessfully in 2015 for the school board District 3 seat against incumbent Tamar Galatzan and came in fifth place in the primary. (Scott Schmerelson won that seat.) District 3 includes the west San Fernando Valley. Petersen raised $2,160 and spent $2,641 in that failed bid, records show.

The primary election will take place on March 7. Also running are Board President Steve Zimmer in District 4, who is seeking re-election against challenger Nick Melvoin. Melvoin has raised about $124,000, compared to Zimmer’s $7,300, according to city filings.

Zimmer said he has been focused on statewide ballot measures in the Nov. 8 election, such as Prop. 55, an extension of income taxes on the wealthy for public education, and Prop. 58, which would repeal a law that prohibits non-English languages from being used in public schools. Zimmer said he is also working to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton as president.

No one has officially declared for an open seat in District 6 where school board member Monica Ratliff is running instead for a seat on the City Council.

So far, no one else has entered the District 2 race against Garcia. She was first elected in 2006 in a special election where she replaced her boss, Jose Huizar, who had won a seat on the City Council.

School board candidates officially file for the race in November, but they can begin to raise money and declare their intent to do so with the Ethics Commission.

If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes in the March 7 primary, the top two vote-getters go on to compete in the May 16 general election.

LA Unified school board member Tamar Galatzan

With less than 24 hours to go before the polls open, LA Unified school board candidate Carl Petersen said today that he filed several ethics complaints against Tamar Galatzan, the District 3 incumbent he is challenging in tomorrow’s elections.

Petersen levied the same complaints that were filed last week with the City Ethics Commission by candidate Filiberto Gonzalez, only Petersen filed them with LA Unified’s Office of the Inspector General, claiming that Galatzan improperly used her board office as part of her campaign in connection with a town hall meeting she held on Feb. 17. Petersen said in a press release he filed the “allegations” with the district because “the greater concern is the waste of badly needed education funds.”

Petersen also said he filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission that Galatzan’s campaign failed to disclose campaign expenses in a timely manner.

Galatzan’s campaign did not respond to a request to comment.

Carl Petersen

* UPDATED

This is the next in a series of profiles on candidates running in the March 3 primary for the LA Unified school board. Today’s focus is Carl Petersen, a candidate for the District 3 seat.

If Carl Petersen does not win the crowded LA Unified school board race for District 3, it certainly won’t be because he was not aggressive enough.

He has been relentlessly hammering incumbent Tamar Galatzan for months on Twitter, Facebook, in press releases and the comments section of LA School Report. Long before most of the other four challengers declared their candidacy, Petersen was calling out Galatzan for every fault he perceived, on issues great, small and some Galatzan had little to do with.

Petersen’s first comment on LA School Report, posted nine months ago, was a hyperbolic prologue for the attacks to follow: “The parents of 36,300 LAUSD students are convinced that charter schools can educate their children better than the district run schools. Tamar Galatzan and the rest of the School Board are failing their community. It is time for a change.”

Petersen has been especially critical of Galatzan for the support she receives from the pro-charter, reform-based community even though he sends two of his children to a charter school, Granada Hills Charter High School, his neighborhood school.

“Charters exist because parents perceive that the district schools are failing,” he said. “So every time that a parent chooses one of those schools, that means the board has failed. I see the job of the board as to promote public schools. When Tamar is being supported by charter schools, that is like putting someone who likes to drink Coke on the Pepsi board of directors.”

For now, a month before the March 3 elections, it does not appear District 3 voters are warming to him. He has received only $75 in campaign contributions, well behind all the other candidates in the race, leaving him currently with campaign debt of $324, according to the LA Ethics Commission.

Galatzan has raised more than $14,000.

Petersen said it was the bad taste left in his mouth when dealing with the district’s bureaucracy that led him to run. He said two of this children are on the autism spectrum, but an educational plan for them that was supported by their teachers and the school’s staff was vetoed by the district.

“We had to hire a lawyer and spend two days downtown dealing with the bureaucracy,” he said. “And at some point during that time I said, ‘This is a system that has to change,’ and half jokingly said to my wife, ‘I should run for school board or something.’ And she said, ‘Yeah you should,’ So that’s where I am now.”

Petersen, 46, has worked in the private sector his whole career, and for the last 10 years has been director of logistics for Arecont Vision, a company that makes security cameras. He said his experience in business combined with having dealt with LA Unified as a parent makes him an ideal candidate even with the three of the other four challengers having worked in education circles.

His three big campaign issues are cutting down on district bureaucracy, giving schools more power to make their own decisions and decreasing the focus on standardized tests. Regarding the teachers union, UTLA, Petersen said he is supportive of their goals in a new contract.

When it comes to Galatzan, his main criticism is that she is not engaged enough, blaming her for not having more oversight of MiSiS and the iPad programs, two expensive debacles that have blown up in the school board’s face and were partly responsible for the resignation of former Superintendent John Deasy

“MiSiS never should have happened,” Petersen said. “They had already been through this with the payroll system, they knew what would happen when you institute a program like that without controls. When the incumbent says, ‘I had no idea what was going on,’ that’s no excuse, it is her job to know whats going on.”

* Clarifies to say Granada Hills Charter High School is Petersen’s neighborhood school. Also, three, not four of the other challenges have worked in education.

Carl Petersen

Whether LA Unified board member Tamar Galatzan runs for reelection or not, voters in her District 3 will have two other candidates to consider in the 2015 board election.

Carl Petersen, Director of Logistics for a Glendale manufacturing company, and Elizabeth Badger, owner of an auto repair company in Canoga Park, have filed to run, according to the LA City Ethics Commission.

Galatzan, who is also an assistant city attorney, has not yet filed with the commission to run for reelection.

Petersen’s candidacy represents his first run for public office.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a year,” he said in an interview, explaining that his prime motivation was encountering obstacles in his quest for help for two of his daughters with autism.

“It’s such a bureaucratic process with all the hoops they make you jump through,” he said. “There’s a feeling throughout the district that the board doesn’t listen to parents. You see it in Breakfast in the Classroom, the iPads. They have a deaf ear to parents. Parents are speaking, but the board doesn’t listen.”

Elizabeth Badger

Petersen, 46, said his interest in running was not necessarily in protest of Galatzan. Not initially, anyway.

“At first it was more general,” he said. “But then, I attended one of her community meetings about the budget. After listening to her, I was not impressed.”

Badger, 55, is no stranger to local politics. In April 2013, she finished fourth in a field of six for a City Council seat, winning 9.3 percent of the vote. Five months later, she placed seventh in a field of 11 in a special election for a California assembly seat, with 2.8 percent of the vote.

Her decision to run for the school board was based on experiences similar to Petersen’s.

As the mother of children with special needs, she said she grew angry and frustrated over efforts to get them support they needed in school.

“I refused to give up,” she told LA School Report, recalling months of grappling with school officials. She finally prevailed, she said, and that inspired her to seek the board seat.

“Children need an advocate, who understands them, who will fight the system for them, who will stand up to the status quo,” she said. “That’s me.”

She also said her initial motivation was not dissatisfaction with Galatzan. Rather, she said, it was an encounter with Galatzan in January when she asked if she intended to run again.

“She just told me she was thinking about it,” Badger said. “Filing for the seat started in the Fall. So it was clear to me she’s not running.”

Both candidates said they are supportive of UTLA, the teachers union, but not without limits. Petersen said he favors teacher evaluations but not solely based on standardized testing. Badger said she’s open to all approaches to education, even charters, if it helps children learn.

“I’d like to work with the union to fix problems,” Petersen said. “But blind loyalty? I wouldn’t say that. Depends on the issue; I like to look at both sides.”

Badger said, “The unions have done great work, but some of it has gone too far, especially UTLA. I’m not afraid to stand up to them. I’d love their support, but if I don’t get it, that’s fine.”

Board District 3 is now the third of LA Unified’s four districts to have a contested election next year.

In District 1, the seat held for a decade by the late Marguerite LaMotte, three people have entered the race – Daymond Johnson, Erick Morales and Rodney Robinson, and in District 5, now represented by Bennett Kayser, SEIU Local 99 President Barbara Torres has filed to run.

Only in District 7, represented by the board’s current president, Richard Vladovic, has no challenger emerged.