THE BELL CURVE:Humor, candor from school board hopeful

When Sandy Asper was introduced at a Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce meeting after a litany of introductions of candidates for the Newport-Mesa School Board, she stood up and said: “I’m Sandy Asper, and I’m an alcoholic…. No, hold on, wrong meeting. I’m just kidding. Just a joke to see if you’re awake. Actually, I’m running for the school board.”

She then went on to tell her startled audience that the minute-and-a-half left to her was not enough to explain her position on issues she considers vital so she would be pleased if they would check out her website (www.sandy asper.com) where they would find a much younger picture of her.

This was such a radical departure from the frequent doldrums of such events that I had to ask her why on earth she would take such a risk?

“I did it to get their attention,” she explained. “I do things like that, especially when people are as intense as they are in these campaigns. They need to be lightened up a little.”

Asper has become the official lightener in the upcoming local elections. Whether it will add to or detract from her considerable qualifications for a seat on the school board remains to be seen. She has behind her 38 years of teaching in the Newport-Mesa school system, three children who have passed through it and graduated from it, and many years of active participation in the mechanics of education and leadership in her union.

But her wry look at herself and her fellow man is no campaign gambit. With Asper, what you see is what you get.

“I’ve thought about this run for the school board the whole 38 years I’ve been teaching,” she said. “But I can’t be somebody I’m not just because I’m running for office. I’m not a quiet person. It isn’t easy to back off irreverence. And they all laugh. Eventually.”

But she wants to make it clear that she doesn’t carry irreverence over into dealing with the educational problems she sees in our school system. “I think you can address issues seriously while not taking yourself seriously,” she says. “I always try to make that distinction.”

Among those issues she mentioned to me — in addition to the pro forma improvement of health and safety programs for students — were a firmer hand by the school board in shaping the educational budget; refusal by the board to simply rubber stamp administrative decisions; need for a proper and effective earthquake plan; better communication between the board and teachers, in which board members visit classrooms and occasionally even teach a class; beefing up support of technology throughout the system; and a dramatic increase in student counseling.

“Probably half of the kids we teach have serious family problems,” Asper said. “Many of these kids just need one person to talk to who might turn them around.”

For years she has given her card to students looking for that one person so they could call her at home. One of the callers was a troubled 12-year-old girl with rich potential who was living in a group home.

Two years later, the Aspers adopted her. Asper told Gaby she was going to become the homecoming queen at Estancia High School, and indeed she did. She also became an integral part of the Asper family.

Asper says she’s the only non-Republican running for the school board. By way of evidence, she points out that she wasn’t invited to appear at a candidate meeting with an organization of Republican women.

When she pointed out that the job she is seeking is nonpartisan, she was told that simply doesn’t matter, because “you aren’t a Republican.”

She shrugs that off, just as she dealt with breast cancer 11 years ago. And as she shrugs off what she regards as absurd campaign spending. “I think,” she said, “that spending almost $40,000 on a school board election is downright indecent.” Yet she was persuaded to buy into a slate — those postcards we get in the mail that are often carried into voting booths — from the considerably smaller contributions she gets from mostly teacher friends and support from her union.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she told me. Not even, it appears, of introducing a little patch of humor into the verbal desert of a political campaign.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I feel strongly that next week’s election is one of a handful of the most important elections in my long life — both locally and nationally.

Residents of both Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are facing the same decision: whether to take the government of their city from the hands of a city council cabal that is force feeding its programs and return it to a council whose members are in close touch with and responsible to their electorate.

On the national scene, only the scale is different.

For the first time in six years, the citizens of this country are awakening — in sufficient motivation and numbers — to the damage being done to them by their own government. Next Tuesday, we have a chance to stop the bleeding — or at least bring it under some control — by taking over the legislative branch and thereby restoring accountability of the executive branch to the electorate. Failure to do this would give the present crew in Washington two more years to embark on God knows what new adventures.

Wherever along this arc you fall, vote next Tuesday. We don’t want to lose the country by default. Or even save it that way.