There are people who hate Genethia Hayes, the president of the Los Angeles Board of Education. They doubt her honesty, her independence, her civility and her accomplishments; they say she is a puppet of Mayor Richard Riordan, an arrogant, foulmouthed careerist who will stop at nothing in her path.
There are also a lot of people who admire, even adore her. They say she is brutally honest, brilliant and articulate, a puppet of no one, a compassionate woman with a strong inner compass and deep religious faith who will stop at nothing in her path.
On this last point, at least, there is agreement.
"I would, of course, always try to build consensus," said Hayes, during two days of interviews last month.
But if that fails and she believes others are standing between her and her goal, "I will bowl those people right out of the way. . . . No, I will not build consensus with those people."
The Los Angeles Unified School District, an immovable object if ever there was one, has met an irresistible force in the sharp form of Genethia Hudley Hayes.
Since taking over the school board presidency in July, she has leaped into the public spotlight as the woman who spearheaded the effort to oust then-Supt. Ruben Zacarias in the midst of environmental scandals at the Belmont Learning Complex and other school sites.
Last Friday Zacarias left his post, replaced by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who began by making two bold promises that attest to just how bad things have gotten: By June 30, he said, all pupils will have clean bathrooms and all the textbooks they need.
Hayes says this is just the beginning. She wants to do what school reformers have talked about for years--making the nation's second-largest school district leaner and smarter, capable of giving a quality education to rich and poor students alike.
The obstacles are overwhelming:
* A huge and deep-rooted bureaucracy.
* A student population of 711,000, nearly half of whom have a limited command of English and 72% of whom are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized meals.
* High dropout rates.
* Secession movements.
'She Thinks Like a Revolutionary'
But if anyone can turn things around, her supporters say, maybe, just maybe, it's Hayes.
"You don't run across a lot of Genethia Hayeses in life," said one of her best friends, Constance Rice, western regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "She's smart, she has a vision, she knows how to get stuff done, she's fearless."
