Power: Reformer R.I.P.

The revelation was stunning, gut-cinching. How the hell did this happen? And how the hell was he going to fix it?

On a Friday last October, Paul Vallas took his wife and two close aides to the Rose Tattoo Cafe on Callowhill for an impromptu lunch. The aides, Hugh Allen and Leigh Whitaker, didn’t know until they arrived at the restaurant that the occasion was a celebration of their boss’s 22nd wedding anniversary. But that’s how it was with the manic, voluble Vallas — the line between life and work, between personal and public, had long ago been smudged out of existence. Camped around a corner table, under the ubiquitous hanging flowers and plants, the foursome talked about the offer Vallas had been mulling — to run Los Angeles’s schools. Whitaker assured Vallas, who had earned a national reputation by turning around problem school districts in Chicago and Philadelphia, that he had made the right decision by passing on the job.

Vallas ordered jambalaya, and as usual, he ate fast, as if someone might snatch the plate away before he was done. Then he picked at other people’s plates. “Are you going to finish that?” he asked.

After about an hour, while the four sipped coffee, Whitaker’s cell rang. It was Claudia Averette, Vallas’s chief of staff.

“I need to talk to Paul,” she said. Averette’s voice was oddly formal, serious. Whitaker passed her boss the phone, and Averette told Vallas what she had just learned from the finance team: The deficit in the district’s budget was worse than anybody thought. A lot worse.

After she was finished, all Averette heard was silence. “Are you there Paul? Paul?”

Paul was there. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he finally said. “This is bullshit. … This is bullshit.”

Then, as Hugh Allen later recalled, “He blew a gasket.” Vallas’s voice climbed the rungs of disbelief, and his speech quickened. He stood up.

“What do you mean!?” he bellowed. “What do you mean?!”

The restaurant wasn’t crowded, but a few heads turned to watch the six-foot-five-and-a-half-inch, gawky, bespectacled man’s curse-filled rant.

Vallas rushed back to headquarters and quickly convened a meeting of top district officials. Huddled in a conference room, they listened and watched as their boss — a man capable of both immense warmth and fierce, bludgeoning anger — traversed a wide spectrum of emotion. “This is shit people resign over,” Vallas told his staff.

They all sat there, baking in the tension, bracing for his verbal blows. He grilled the finance people, clubbing them with questions faster than they could lob up answers. They didn’t know why the deficit was so high; they would have to do more research to find out.

Vallas slumped low in a chair, his head level with the table’s surface.

After a while, he grew quiet, cocooned in despair. Then he did something uncharacteristic for a man who prides himself on being able to solve almost any ­problem — and who is particularly renowned for being a budget whiz. He placed the sheet of paper he’d been reading — the one with the glaring new figures — on the table.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, his voice softening. “I don’t know how to fix this.”



FIXING THINGS, of course, is how Paul Vallas made a name for himself, and what first brought him to Philadelphia in July of 2002. Fresh off a successful six-year stint as head of Chicago’s public schools, Vallas was hired to perform a similar sort of turnaround here.