Local News in Brief : School Official Will Quit

Inglewood Unified School District Supt. Rex Fortune notified school board members Monday that he plans to resign after a stormy five-year tenure at the 15,000-student district.

Fortune’s announcement came less than three months after school board members Lois Hill-Hale and Zyra McCloud provoked controversy by voting him a two-year contract extension at a time when two seats on the five-member board were vacant.

Fortune told the board at its Monday meeting that he would accept a superintendency he had been offered by a school district in the Sacramento area. His resignation will be effective at the end of the school year in June.

Fortune was hired in 1983 and soon became the center of a political struggle between board factions. In 1985, three board members fired him, sparking an uproar among community leaders who said the board majority were allies of Mayor Edward Vincent and had punished Fortune because he resisted their efforts to control the district and its 1,200 jobs on Vincent’s behalf.

Fortune was rehired, but some board members blamed him for the district’s first teachers strike last year, a projected $3-million budget deficit next year and lagging test scores among the district’s mostly black and Latino students.