The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 26

'V Iff 1" y'" s' in I f. CC PART II MONDAY, CEClMBfR 9, 1948 iup" i 1 i Action Due on Plan to Revamp Education Independent Study Finds Aim Now Scemi Merely to Maintain Status Quo I i -C. 5 i hi jT jj -i -v --s. -r4V' 1 1 BY JACK McCURDY The seven-year effort to overhaul the State Department of Education omldered by tome as the ont move which could havt the greatest Impact on California'! public school la scheduled for final action by lha State Hoard of Education this wrtk. Some leading educator say the lisue has come down to thl: Will the state's top education agency be redesigned with new capacity to help local school districts with their burgeoning problems and to foster educational Innovation? Or will It be allowed to remain a department which, according to an outside study, simply maintains the status quo In the conduct of publla education and has failed to provide the leadership and -direction which the state school system sorely lacks? Docs Housekeeping Chores The department, the study found, now performs little more than housekeeping functions, mainly in routine administrative dealings with local school districts.

But It has the potential to become a powerful, pervasive force in producing more efficiently-run and effective schools In practically every locality. To do this, the department would be equipped with: 1 Special teams which would be free to concentrate on problems In local school districts, such as reading, the new math or introduction of teaching machines. 2 Personnel who would devote their time to research, evaluation of new methods, disseminating information about education and stimulating new ideas. 3 Other groups who would develop new programs for school districts and long-range goals and plans to gain the best use of the state's funds and manpower in education. However, this approach has been rejected in a proposal which, will be Feud of Unions May Stall Retail Clerks Contract Battle Overshadows End of 6-Week Strike Against Safeway and Bakery Here BY HARRY BERNSTEIN TtaM MM WMT Threat of i nationwide strike gainst the Safeway Co.

brought a quick settlement this weekend to a bitter, six-week strike against Safeway and The Pacific Cracker Co. here. But If one segment of the food Industry's labor problems la Southern California has been settled, another, far larger segment appears headed for trouble. The big battle Is coming In negotiations for a new contract covering 45,000 members of the AFL-CIO Retail Clerks Union in Southern California, where union leaders are feuding. There was some drama In the Bmaller bakery dispute, and some violence, which Is rare In strikes these days.

The strike ended, said Archie Goodman, representative of the AFL-CIO American Bakery Confectionery Workers Union, when the nationwide strike threat against Safeway brought an order from Safeway's top officials to local management negotiators here to settle the dispute promptly. Wages, Fringe Benefits MAY BE SWINGING SOON Coo! Fire Deportment Copt. John firehouse door which has loin on ground for nearly a year. A new Thomason stands before the firehouse, 1953 fire truck ond unhung door may soon be forthcoming, provided by a motorist's Insurance. Tlmfi photo by Bter FonUntnl FINAL LINK DEDICATED Hot ROW Over Cool San Diego Freeway Now Reality firehouse Door 1 M.

May be Resolved in West Los Angeles, was adopted in 1943, according to highway officials. Now the freeway, for better or worse, has become part of the region's landscape. It cuts an arching 94-mile-long swath around Central Los Angeles and through Orange County. Along the way, the freeway, which Is part of the interstate system, goes through or near more than 23 communities. Eventually it will connect with 29 other freeways, including the future Century and Beverly Hills routes, as the $6 billion system here takes shape.

The San Diego Freeway is doing what it was built for to carry traffic. But as freeways go It is doing a lot more. It has, for example, provided Los Angeles with "windows" to view what planners call the cityscape. Passes Ugly Sections One is atop Sepulveda Pass, looking out over the lights of the San Fernando Valley. Another is on the other side of the pass with West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills stretched out below.

But it is another story farther south, where the freeway slants across ugly urban fringes. Housing tracts, new not long ago, are mixed with a disarray of industrial plants. For the jammed San Diego Freeway and its good and bad cityscapes Los Angeles motorists paid $3.7 million a mile in land and construction costs. But the price is cheap, considering that the Santa Monica Freeway, cutting through the center of Los Angeles, cost about $15 million a mile. The amount of land the Division of BY CHARLES HILLINGER Tlmtt Staff Wrtttr COOL The hot year-long controversy over Cool's unhung firehouse door may be resolved shortly.

For 12 months the Cool Fire Department's firehouse door has been flat on the ground in front of the station. And the 10 Cool firewomen and most of the townspeople don't like it. But the men of one of the few departments that includes women as fire fighters claim they haven't been able to muster enough manpower so far this year to hang the heavy door. A noteworthy development in the problem occurred recently in the hamlet of 100 persons, 40 miles northeast of Sacramento. For the seventh time in recent months a car careened off Highway 49 in downtown Cool and shot through Jennie Niegel's front yard.

Hole Punched in Door The car plowed up the 84-year-old artist's garden and knocked down her white picket fence. The driver escaped with scratches. But one of Mrs. Niegel's fence posts was hurled through the air and punched a hole through the firehouse door. "It was a blessing," said Mrs.

Ruth White, 52, a Cool firewoman. "Not for Jennie. She's getting accustomed to a new fence every few months." But Mrs. White and the other firewomen are hoping the motorist's insurance will pay for an aluminum lightweight door. "The one on the ground was donated by the Forestry Depart-' ment," explained Mrs.

White. "Even if the firemen ever got around to installing the door, it would be too heavy for firewomen to open. "We're one of few towns in the country with firewomen," she added. "Not auxiliaries, but the real McCoy. The gals roll on all fires." The fire department door isn't Cool's only problem.

The town's unusual name, which brings requests from all over the Please Turn to Page 5, Col. 2 recommended by a committee to the board at its meeting Thursday and Friday. But board President Howard Day is convinced that the committee proposal, approved after a one-year study, will make the department 100 more effective in providing leadership to education. The committee's plan calls generally for reshuffling divisions and duties in the department and some new functions, such as research and development. Others contend that the commutes plan involves nothing more than tinkering with an inherently outmoded setup.

Want Different Structure It totally ignores, they say, the essential need for a different organizational structure complete with new goals, responsibilities and approaches. "It (committee program) is like giving a tuneup when you need a whole new motor," one educator said. The broader concept involves the recommendations of Arthur D. Little, a management consulting firm which conducted a $250,000 five-year study of the department. The agency as it now operates is typical of ctate education departments throughout the country.

But the ADL proposal, supporters say, would turn it into a unique enterprise in educational organization, grounded in modern business management techniques, program-budgeting principles and tied to careful planning and evaluation of activities to make certain that Please Turn to Page 4, Col. 1 BY RAY IIEBERT Tlm Urtaa AIMr WrtNT The goliath among Southern California's freeways is completed all $355 million of it. Community leaders and state officials ceremoniously opened the last Los Angeles region link in the San Diego Freeway the other further establishing this area as the unrivaled land. of freeways. As freeway 'dedications go, the affair was routine a band, speeches and a promise that traffic would be allowed over the new section soon.

Golden Marker Urged More could have been done to dramatize the event Although the dedication was the State Division of Highways' eighth this year, this one was special. It marked completion of the longest, costliest freeway in Los Angeles and Orange counties. There may never be another quite like it. "They should have driven a golden lane marker, or something, to commemorate this thing," an observer said. The freeway's final link, an 8-mile, eight lane double band of concrete across the Irvine Ranch in Orange County, was completed 13 years after work started on the sweeping by-pass loop.

Division of Highways' records are hazy but planning on what eventually became the San Diego Freeway began in the early The route for the freeway'3 first section, NOT YET JAJUJUra Wifnru fTTf. Irf9 P'p" 1 Pv Diego Freeway is almost impossible to calculate precisely now, nearly 13 years after work on the route began. Laying out the right-of-way consumed more than 5 square miles, an area about twice again the size of South Pasadena. In its path were plush neighborhoods, heavily populated communities, some near-slums, industrial districts and through Orange County, rich agricultural land. It wiped out nearly 5,000 Individual parcels.

Again, Division of Highways records are sketchy, but if 60 of those purchased contained houses and apartments, from 10,000 to 15,000 people perhaps more were forced to find homes elsewhere. Built as a by-pass route to avoid the center of the metropolitan area, the San Diego Freeway connects with the Golden State Freeway in the San Fernando Valley and with the Santa Ana Freeway at the other end in Orange' County. Motorists can take it to miss the heavily traveled Golden State, Hoi- lywood and Santa Ana freeways, but they're just as likely, to run into as Please Torn to Page 5, Col. 1 FINAL LINK-Broken line indicates final link of San Diego Freeway, cutting ocross the Irvine Ranch in Orcrvfe County. It marks completion 6 13 years work.

Ji A ta "P- Is Sanu PP OCiV jj 0 10 15 ll ff The new, three-year bakery agree- ment provides for wage and fringe benefits estimated by John Bacon of the Food Employers Council (FEC) at 76V cents an hour and by Goodman at 86 cents an hour. But by either estimate, it represents a substantial union victory because employers had offered a package of only 56 cents before the strike. 9 The issue in the bakery dispute was a union demand that Safeway and Pacific Cracker catch up to the contract terms agreed to by the giant National Biscuit Co. in its national contract which provided for about 65 cents an hour over a two-year period. The FEC refused, saying it would not let the national contract agreement of NBC be used as a pattern here, and the strike was on.

The union was determined to go substantially beyond the three-year 56-cent offer made by Safeway and Pacific Cracker because the AFL-CIO affiliate had just finished a bitter fight with-its rival, the independent Bakery Confec-- tionary Workers Union. Independent Ousted The AFL-CIO affiliate had managed to oust the independent union as representative of workers at Safeway and Pacific Cracker, and a victory was needed in negotiations to show the workers that their decision to change unions was a wise one. There was arson, tire slashings and other incidents of vandalism during the strike, when it was not heading toward settlement. Last week, the AFL-CIO affiliate held a meeting of all local unions with contracts at National Safeway. They agreed to the nationwide if the local strike wasn't settled by this weekend.

John DeConcini, vice president of the AFLrCIO affiliate, flew to Los Angeles, and within a matter of hours the new pact, close to what the union had originally asked for, was agreed upon. Please Turn to Back Page, Col 1 MARIJUANA USER'S TRIPS TO FANTASY END IN SUICIDE BY HAL LEIBEN Tlm Staff Wrttor SAN GABRIEL A dramatic tes-, timonial" to marijuana, written by a 28-year-old man just before he committed suicide, was read at a recent meeting on drug abuse at a public meeting of the San Gabriel Community Coordinating Council The note, addressed by the dead man to a coworker, was read by San Gabriel Pclic Lt Wayne Coleman, a speaker at the meeting, who said believed marijuana bad played a Sat Part in driving the man to TUn Tins rj 8, CL 4 Negro Teachers Launch Effort to Bridge Gap With Community Highways acquired for the San wrlr mnire nr rWrl erP P- i -V. -P- Negro teachers in the Los Angeles city school system have embarked on their own program to uplift education in their community. George Taylor, president of the newly organized Black Educators, said: As black people, we want to help in achieving self-determination for the community. We feel we can do this and we hope to fill the vacuum that has existed between the black community and teachers.

"The-middle class is becoming' Involved." The most obvious and pressing contribution the Negro teachers could make, he said, is "to develop effective curriculum and teaching methods for black kida." The new teachers', group feels Negro youngsters "are coming out of the schools unprepared," Taylor continued. "It is obvious the curriculum and teaching methods now used have failed. The school aystea la totally damaging to the child. It Is InrilUsg an even greater feeling of inferiority." This feeling is a result of "the white, middle-class value system of the school which in many cases is in direct conflict with the standards that black children have established in their own environment," he said. "Many of the rules, regulations and procedures which are based on thi3 system and the school enforces are not truly understood by black youngsters.

"Over a period of time, however, most eventually accept these rules. But they reflect on the child. They make him feel his ways are wrong and that he is psychologically inf erf-or." For example, Taylor said, standard English and Negro dialect are often dealt with by teachers in terms of "right and wrong," which conveys the value Judgment cf "good and bad." Dropouts, in returning to school, are often forced to go through rietts Tun Pag 3, CaL 1.