Executive Joins School District in No. 3 Post

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Sid Thompson, seeking to bring new vision to his administration, has appointed a retired Arco executive as the business and finance czar of the nation’s second-largest school district.

William H. Magee, 56, was controller and a vice president for the Atlantic Richfield Co. for six years and oversaw all financial, legal and public affairs for the Arco Chemical Co. He will become the No. 3 man in the district hierarchy, after Thompson and Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

Magee is the only outsider that Thompson has brought into his close circle of senior staff. He will be paid $109,000 a year in a contract that extends--like Thompson’s--until June, 1995.

The veteran executive faces massive challenges, including the task of streamlining the district’s maze of centrally run business and budget operations--considered critical to the district’s restructuring efforts. The aim is to create a single computerized financial system so that schools can do their own budgeting, purchasing and staff hiring.

“This is a major appointment and represents a major change in how this system will operate,” Thompson said. “I want a different vision and I want someone to show us a different way of doing things. . . . I need someone with a totally different view.”

Magee, who commanded a substantially higher salary at Arco, said he took the job because “it came at a time in my life when I was looking for an opportunity to contribute to the world in general. . . . I had been retired for four years and I was feeling a little guilty.”

He said he is not looking to shake up the staff, but instead to turn the district’s management practices into a state-of-the-art operation.

“Overall there are a lot of good people here, but in some areas because of underfunding we are still catching up,” he said. “They had rotary phones up until a short period ago--that’s where we are with technology. . . . I want to get them closer to today’s technology and provide an outside financial view of their accounting.”

Magee’s appointment is in keeping with a key recommendation from a scathing management audit in June, which said the district’s budget process is unduly complex and its business divisions cannot provide even basic information--such as the number of employees--in a timely, consistent manner.

The audit by Arthur Andersen & Co. called for eliminating excessive management layers by combining the district’s six major business divisions under one head, who would report directly to Thompson.

Robert Wycoff, president emeritus of Arco, and Roy Anderson, president emeritus of Lockheed, strongly encouraged Thompson to hire an outside business expert to undertake the task and arranged a meeting between the superintendent and Magee.

“It was (Anderson and Wycoff) who came up with Magee,” Thompson said. “We talked about who might be best and, lo and behold, I was informed by them there was someone available.”

Magee is considered a business planning and control expert and came out of early retirement not for the money “but for the challenge,” Anderson said.

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Two school employee union leaders, who are often quick to criticize district decisions, called the decision to hire Magee a step in the right direction and agreed that an outside business expert was needed.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said Magee could be the district’s “last best hope” and that the union will closely monitor his actions.

“I think people are sick and tired of the way things operate around here,” Bernstein said. “If he can get things done and more efficiently, then we’re on the right track. If he’s just one more ‘yes’ man to lead the district in its status quo, that will be something else.”

Eli Brent, president of the administrators union, Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, said the district needs its computer system upgraded and that the district must run its business divisions more efficiently.

“The proof of the pudding will be what happens, what he gets done,” Brent said. “I’m waiting to see what he comes up with.”