At a better school, in a less desperate part of the city, Zeus Cubias might have shrugged off the disruption.
But after a decade teaching at Locke High School -- one of the worst in the Los Angeles public school system -- he was annoyed when a recent geometry class ended with one more small reminder of how much things need to change.
Cubias had wolfed down his lunch and hustled back to his room for the start of class. He launched enthusiastically into a special two-day lesson he had devised.
"All right, your job is to paint the school," he said, his voice raspy from a morning of classes. "How can we use geometry to figure it out?"
The hour passed quickly as talk turned to angles, protractors and calculating area. A minute before the bell was to sound, Cubias warned his students that they would need a quick start the next day in order to finish the assignment.
"Sorry, Cubias," one student called out, "I won't be here. Field trip to the beach."
"Me too," a chorus of others chimed in.
Standing at the front of the room, the teacher bowed his head and rubbed his eyes wearily -- the frustration welling up. Half his students would be absent the next day, and no administrator or other teacher had bothered to tell him. The lesson he had designed would have to be postponed.
"I'm just tired, man," he said later. "Tired that whenever you want to do something positive for the kids, it's a struggle. It shouldn't be this hard."
Cubias is symbolically at the center of a power struggle taking shape in the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest. With a prominent charter school organization challenging the district for control of Locke, the school's teachers ultimately must decide which is better able to deliver badly needed reforms.
The direction that Cubias and the rest of the faculty choose could have far-reaching implications for L.A. Unified, as teachers at other schools consider similar options.
The charter group, Green Dot Public Schools, shocked district officials in May when it announced that a majority of Locke's tenured teachers had signed petitions in support of a Green Dot takeover, clearing the major legal barrier to converting the campus into several independent schools.
District officials countered with promises to teachers of increased authority and reforms if Locke remained within the district. After several teachers rescinded their signatures, saying they were confused about the takeover proposal, district officials threw out the formal takeover plan submitted by Green Dot.
