CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Bayside City Can’t Shed Rough-and-Tumble Image : Emeryville, once known for its card parlors and brothels, blossoms with high-tech industrial parks and high-rise condos. But it remains mired in controversy and scandal.

EMERYVILLE, Calif. — This little city at the foot of the Bay Bridge cannot seem to outgrow its reputation for controversy, corruption and scandal.

Long a center of vice and gambling in the East Bay, the booming waterfront town has embarked on a quest for respectability, with high-rise condos and high-tech industrial parks replacing acres of tired factories and warehouses.

Artists have discovered Emeryville, setting up studios in the empty industrial spaces. They have been joined by young professionals, lured by the bayside location and proximity to Berkeley and San Francisco.

But there is still this nasty business about the city’s tiny school district.

Police are investigating whether as many as half of the district’s two dozen teachers have spanked or otherwise struck their students, a violation of state law.

The school board has also been trying to determine who cheated on a standardized test for eighth-graders by erasing the students’ wrong answers and filling in the correct responses.

In this city of 5,700 people, the controversy has forced people to choose sides and has been marked by open mistrust, harsh personal attacks and a flood of lawsuits.

“The political circus in Emeryville has been a regular feature in the East Bay for 70 years,” said Paul Herzoff, a photographer and local historian. “It’s a tumultuous town.”

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The charge that teachers struck Emeryville students was raised by maverick Berkeley attorney Kate Dixon, who is sometimes described by other attorneys and local officials as “a loose cannon.”

“They accuse me of being a fanatic and a zealot,” Dixon said. “I am. I am because I have to be.”

Dixon is no stranger to the politics of Emeryville. Her aunt once served on the school board and feuded for years with the superintendent--at one point asking a witch to put a hex on him.

Now Dixon is suing the district of 560 students for operating segregated schools--even though it has only one high school and one elementary school. But the segregation charge made less of an impact than another allegation leveled in the suit.

She contends that teachers in the two schools have used corporal punishment on students, and with her suit submitted 23 videotaped statements, some from children who said they were struck and others who said they witnessed abuse by teachers.

After seeing the videos last fall, U.S. District Judge Barbara Caulfield sealed the tapes and ordered the district to cease and desist if any corporal punishment was occurring.

Since then, Emeryville police have been investigating. A classroom search led to confiscation of a paddle and paper tube somewhat similar to items that children said were used to hit them.

“We have found some slight impropriety,” said Sgt. Leon Maliszewski. But, he added, the investigation has been hampered by a lack of cooperation from the parents and children who are Dixon’s clients.

Joyce Bratton, an Emeryville mother of three, said in an interview that physical abuse of her daughters began four years ago and that she confronted school officials. Even so, she said, on different occasions a teacher has slammed one of her children down on a bench, pulled the child’s ear and pinched her cheeks very hard.

A math teacher in Berkeley, Bratton says she visits her children’s classrooms every day to prevent further abuse. But she said she is not cooperating with the police because she does not trust the Emeryville department to conduct a fair investigation.

“I am so frustrated,” Bratton said. “As a parent, I just feel like my children are being cheated. Not only are they being cheated, they are being abused and I’m not going to tolerate it anymore. As an educator, I am beginning to have a very dismal view of public education.”

School officials say they are doing their best to look into the charges of abuse. “The moment it was brought to our attention, we got right on it,” said school board President Cheryl Bolling.

But, she said, some critics are motivated by a vendetta against the school district and, in particular, Supt. Peter Corona.

Dixon has brought numerous suits against the district and Corona, including one in which she charged that the superintendent raped a female student. Corona and the girl denied the charge, and Dixon was ordered to pay Corona $10,000 in legal costs. The superintendent is countersuing Dixon for libel.

But that does not stop Dixon from continuing to make similar alarming claims, all denied by Corona and his attorney.

“He’s already suing me for $5 million, add another $10 million on,” Dixon said. “Peter Corona himself is . . . a white supremacist. He likes to keep them dumb, keep them down, keep them segregated and he does it by mental terror and physical terror.

“There is a big conspiracy between the school board, the teachers who have committed abuse, and the police to prevent the cases of abuse from being known to the public and prosecuted.”

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Wedged between San Francisco Bay and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, Emeryville was founded by saloonkeepers, businessmen and gamblers who kept the town under a tight rein. In its heyday early this century, the city boasted a racetrack, card parlors, brothels, 50 bars and no churches.

As Alameda County district attorney, a young Earl Warren (later California governor and chief justice of the United States) cracked down on vice in Emeryville, a town he once branded as “the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast.”

As many as 20,000 people worked in its factories; thousands more came to the town’s baseball stadium to watch the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, which in the 1940s featured Casey Stengel as manager and Billy Martin at second base.

Into the early 1980s, the town was run by its powerful police chief, John Lacoste, son of longtime Mayor Al Lacoste. The chief drove a DeLorean with the license plate EPD1 and often operated out of a bar called the Town House.

Under Lacoste and his developer friends, the town began to grow. The city filled in a section of San Francisco Bay and built a 1,250-unit apartment complex that doubled the city’s population overnight.

The new complex and others that followed began changing the character of the city, attracting more young urban professionals. Artists began taking over warehouses and turning them into spaces to work and live. Firms such as Chiron Corp., a biotechnology company, moved into new industrial parks in the old factory district.

Once well endowed, the Emeryville schools fell on hard times in the 1970s. In 1983, the district was the first to need a bailout from the state since the Great Depression.

To boost enrollment and thus state funding, the district opened its doors to students from Oakland and Berkeley, many of them minorities. The school rolls are now 92% minority, which residents say has led to racial polarization in the city, where 49% of the population is Anglo. Despite its problems, the district has made steady improvement in its test scores, and was jarred last month by the discovery of cheating. The computer that graded the standardized test found that there had been a high rate of erasures; an inspection showed that the corrected answers were made by a different hand than the students’ marks.

“We don’t know who did it, but the tests were not secured like they should have been,” board President Bolling said. Then she added: “Emeryville is a very small, quaint district with big problems.”