By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter
Allison Holdorff Polhill, a lawyer and mother who served on multiple education boards in Pacific Palisades, is now running for a seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education, challenging incumbent Steve Zimmer.
Zimmer has represented District Four, which includes the Palisades, since 2009. Now Polhill is vying to replace him, with a promise to combat the school district’s budget deficit and to lend equal support to “all high-performing” schools—a nod to the ongoing debate regarding the district’s approach to charters.
Polhill, a 20-year Alphabet Streets resident with three children, found her legal background helpful while she served as a governing board member at Palisades Charter Elementary, Paul Revere Charter Middle School and, finally, Palisades Charter High School.
Polhill told the Palisadian-Post that six years of experience on PaliHi’s Board of Trustees prepared her to tackle issues facing LAUSD as a whole. The candidate is highly critical of the district’s budget deficit—reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars—and promised that she would get “serious fiscal brains around the issue to figure out where we can make cuts.”
To do so, Polhill would need to convince teachers unions and other school groups to “trim the fat.” She told the Post that her experience negotiating with Pali-UTLA (a Palisadian teachers union) as a PaliHi board member proved her ability to handle fiscal bargaining.
“We really figured out how to work it out,” said Polhill of balancing Pali’s budget. “We [had] amazing teachers who are part of the union who [looked] at the budget and [said], ‘this is what we need to do for the students.’”
Polhill said students (and parents) also deserve school choice—a contentious issue for LAUSD. The candidate was critical of the board’s October decision to deny the renewal of five LA charter schools, one that punctuated the divisive traditional/alternative school debate. While skeptics argued that the schools’ charter status was revoked because of poor oversight and transparency by their governing bodies, Polhill called the decision “political.”
The candidate told the Post that it was time to, “put the traditional versus non-traditional debate behind us.” “There’s great magnet schools, there’s great traditional schools and there’s great charter schools,” Polhill added. “It’s insulting to a parent to say, ‘well you can’t look at this option for your kid.’”
That message should resonate in the Palisades, a community dominated by charters where she already touts glowing endorsements from PaliHi principal Dr. Pamela Magee and local teachers. District Four is a sprawling constituency that stretches as far as East Hollywood, however, and Polhill’s message will need to reach a diverse range of communities.
The candidate pointed out that PaliHi is a “very richly diverse school” with students from over 100 zip codes. Polhill told the Post that she fought for the bussing rights of those students (and then raised funds for PaliHi to sponsor their bussing) after the LAUSD board voted to cut public funding to bring them to PaliHi.
She’ll need to emphasize that record as she takes her campaign out of the Palisades to convince voters that she’s suited to serve their communities.
She won’t be the only outsider competing for votes. Fellow District Four challenger Nick Melvoin (a Brentwood educator and activist) announced this week that he bypassed the ballot’s filing fee by gathering 1,000 signatures on a “nominating petition” instead. Melvoin told the Post in August that he was campaigning for an “urgently needed change” from the “status quo.”
The candidates’ race for school board will conclude with other city elections in March.
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