Centinela Board Closes Meeting After Outburst : Schools: Trustees of the racially troubled district allow the press, but not the public, to remain.

Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees barred the public, except for the press, from attending more than half of a school board meeting Tuesday night after a member of the audience interrupted to challenge their procedures.

Although some parents said the disruption was relatively minor compared to other incidents at previous school board meetings, board President Pam Sturgeon said she decided it was necessary to close the meeting to the public to establish control.

“I’m just trying to get a grip on board meetings,” Sturgeon said later. “After the abuse and everything we’ve taken for the past year and a half, we’ve decided we’re not going to take it anymore. . . . We have a right, as a board, to hold a public meeting without disruptions.”

In the past year, the trustees have adjourned several meetings early, often because of disruptions sparked by community activists who have accused the predominantly Latino school board of being insensitive to black parents and discriminating against black employees. The trustees deny the charges.

Tuesday’s meeting, which drew about 50 teachers and parents, was the trustees’ first since racial tensions erupted at Leuzinger High School last Thursday, causing widespread fighting among black and Latino students during lunch recess. In his report on the incident, Supt. Tom Barkelew told the trustees that the brawl involved about 25 students and was sparked by an earlier fight between a black girl and a Latina girl who had exchanged racial epithets.

Although Tuesday’s audience was about twice as large as usual, the meeting started out to be relatively quiet. During the public comment period, Stennis Floyd, a frequently belligerent critic of the board who personally videotapes meetings, accused Sturgeon of having made a racially derogatory remark about former Supt. McKinley Nash, who is black, during the 1989 school board election campaign. The board did not respond to his remarks, although Sturgeon later called the accusation an “out-and-out lie,” and the meeting continued without incident.

The board was just about to entertain a motion on the third of its 11 agenda items when Debra Wong, a black parent who has two daughters and a son at Hawthorne High, called out a question about board procedure from her seat in the audience.

When board members refused to answer her, Lawndale community activist Nancy Marthens stood up and shouted: “She has a point of order.”

Banging on her gavel, Sturgeon angrily told Marthens that she was out of order. As Marthens stormed from the room, Sturgeon announced that the meeting would be recessed to the superintendent’s office and that the press, but not the public, would be invited to attend.

The state Government Code allows governing bodies to clear the public from meeting rooms when meetings are “willfully interrupted” and “order cannot be restored by the removal of individuals.”

Sturgeon said she had been advised by the district’s attorney that the board could either remove a disruptive person or bar the public from the meeting in the event of disruption. “We decided that because tensions are so high in the district, we don’t want to take a chance on anyone getting hurt. We felt if we tried to have someone removed it would make matters only worse.”

Long-simmering racial tensions in the district erupted in March, 1990, when 2,500 students at Leuzinger and Hawthorne high schools boycotted classes to protest the reassignment of a popular black principal. An investigator hired by the district concluded that the walkout was organized by black employees who wanted to discredit the board. However, a state assessment last summer found evidence of racial conflict, and 13 complaints alleging racial discrimination are pending with state and federal agencies.

On Tuesday, parents and teachers were divided over whether the board was justified in closing the meeting to the public. Wong said she did not believe Marthens’ comment constituted enough of a disruption to warrant the action. “It wasn’t life-threatening. It was only an emotional outburst,” Wong said. “They were just looking for an excuse to close the meeting.”

But Walker Williams, a social studies teacher at R. K. Lloyde Continuation High School, said he supported the board’s action. “I think if you allow people to disrupt public meetings, they get out of hand, and public business doesn’t get taken care of,” Williams said. “The board has to deal with this somehow because they have a whole school district to run.”

Sturgeon, who said both Wong and Marthens had failed to follow board procedures, pointed out that Wong had a chance to speak earlier in the evening when the board was taking comments from the public. She also noted that the board is not obligated to take public comments when it is trying to conduct its business.

“We are required by law to give the public the time to speak . . . (but) not in the middle of the meeting when the board is conducting business,” Sturgeon said.

Under board policy, members of the public are given two opportunities to address the board during meetings: before the board begins voting on its action items and before it goes into closed session to discuss personnel or litigation matters.

Speakers are limited to one presentation, up to five minutes in length, for each period and are prohibited from verbally lodging complaints against any employee of the school district or its trustees, regardless of whether the individual is identified. “Remarks by anyone addressing the board of trustees that reflect adversely upon the political, religious, or economic views, character, or motives of any person are out of order,” board policy states. Complaints are to be made in writing.

Once they reconvened in the superintendent’s office, the trustees continued their meeting, which was recorded on audio tape. The board voted on a variety of routine matters, including summer-school offerings, purchase orders and workshop approvals, but postponed a public hearing on the teachers union’s contract negotiations. It agreed to consider at its next meeting a new policy on racial harmony and a community relations policy naming the superintendent or his designee as the coordinator of discrimination complaints.