School Takeover Plan: Too Big an Assignment?

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was elected to represent Los Angeles, but he is trying to seize control of a public school system that sprawls far beyond the city limits. That geographical fact is complicating the mayor’s takeover ambitions, raising legal hurdles and worrying small-city officials who fear ceding power to Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second-largest in the nation, encompassing 710 square miles. The district’s boundaries are so convoluted that the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and L.A. Unified disagree on whether they include 27 or 29 other municipalities. (They agree that the district serves two dozen unincorporated parts of the county.)

Voters in the outlying areas, who the registrar says total more than 249,000, have a say in selecting representatives on the seven-member school board. But they cannot vote for L.A.’s mayor.

Their children add up. One in five students -- 146,706 -- live outside the city of Los Angeles, according to district figures.

Small cities have historically felt overshadowed by Los Angeles’ presence in the district and now wonder if a takeover would make things worse.

“Why would we take all of our opportunity to have a voice and give it to someone else to our own exclusion?” said West Hollywood City Councilman Jeff Prang. “I just think there’s an incredible lack of attention by anyone to consider what happens to these ... other cities.”

Prang and other officials are trying to be heard in the debate. In September, Prang persuaded his colleagues to vote unanimously for a resolution decreeing that West Hollywood “does not support any reforms that diminish the independence or representation of independent cities.” He has been urging other leaders to adopt similar resolutions.

Meanwhile, school board President Marlene Canter said she expects to meet before Christmas with officials from the outlying cities to discuss mayoral control.

A number of small-city officials say a mayoral takeover could prompt them to try to leave L.A. Unified for good. Villaraigosa’s office is also open to the possibility of a district breakup if it would help the mayor improve the educational experience for students within Los Angeles.

“When you look at governance reform, everything is up for grabs,” said mayoral counsel Thomas Saenz, who is heading Villaraigosa’s takeover effort. “The current configuration of the district is not a given -- that it would survive that way forever -- at all. And that’s not news, because some of these municipalities have toyed with the possibility of seceding from LAUSD in the past.”

Saenz said Villaraigosa plans to take the small cities’ concerns into account, and he noted that his office has only begun to study the takeover options. But Prang and others said they would remain nervous until they saw a detailed plan.

Villaraigosa has yet to unveil specifics as to how he plans to wrest control from the elected school board, if at all. Nor has he said how he plans to reform the district’s massive bureaucracy.

In recent weeks, however, he has repeatedly chided the school board and the teachers union for resisting reforms and said that a takeover would be the best way to boost student achievement and graduation rates.

A takeover of Los Angeles’ schools would be much more complicated than in other large cities, such as New York and Chicago, where the mayors have control of the school districts. In those cities, the district and the city boundaries are the same.

Some of the reform models Saenz describes would give L.A.’s mayor the ability to appoint most members of the school board while allowing a smaller number of other board members to be chosen either by elected leaders or voters in the smaller cities.

Some small-city officials, such as Councilman George Cole of Bell, say they are open to a new role for the L.A. mayor in education -- as long as they are still properly represented.

Historically, Cole said, small cities like Bell have worried that Los Angeles receives a disproportionate share of money and school projects.

“I mean, they still for the most part refer to ‘L.A. city schools,’ ” said Cole, who noted that he is a Villaraigosa supporter. “That’s a huge mentality there. Our communities outside the district, especially southeast cities, have been neglected, and that’s a mild term.”

Carson Mayor Jim Dear -- a part-time teacher at an L.A. Unified middle school -- said he wanted to sit down with Villaraigosa before making up his mind. But for now, he said, he has “strong concerns” that a mayoral takeover would diminish Carson residents’ say in district matters.

Dear noted that some Carson residents unsuccessfully tried, through a ballot measure, to secede from L.A. Unified in 2001. That sentiment could gain strength if a mayoral takeover makes people feel short-changed, he said.

“This idea of the mayor of Los Angeles virtually governing, through his appointments, the entire L.A. Unified School District would most likely cause a lot of people in the non-city-of-L.A. areas of L.A. Unified to consider secession,” he said.

The district’s peculiar borders have remained largely unchanged since 1961, when Los Angeles Unified was formed from the melding of a high school district and what was called the city school district. When the city was incorporated in 1870, the school district had the same boundaries. Over the years, outlying school systems were annexed to the city and high school districts.

Today’s preliminary discussions of a breakup amplify a defining tension in a sprawling region that has long struggled with the proper size of its local governments. The school district in particular has survived numerous calls for a breakup. The latest was issued by mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg in last March’s election. After he lost in the first round of voting, the two remaining candidates, Villaraigosa and former Mayor James K. Hahn, focused instead on the idea of greater mayoral oversight.

Los Angeles is not the first California city to address its school district’s governance structure.

In 2000, Oakland voters approved an amendment to the City Charter that gave Mayor Jerry Brown the authority to appoint three additional members to the elected seven-person school board.

Brown said he has counseled Villaraigosa against a similar plan, saying that without control of a majority of the board, he never had enough power to make significant changes.

In Los Angeles, taking control of the district would probably require more than just a charter change, Saenz said.

To ensure that voters outside the city are not disenfranchised, Saenz believes it also will be necessary to pass state legislation allowing a takeover. That approach, he said, would technically give those voters a say in the process, because they have the power to choose their representatives in Sacramento. Saenz believes this dual city-state strategy may also be wise because the state Constitution is vague about whether the city or the state has the ultimate power to change the district’s governance structure.

Prang would rather see a way for non-L.A. residents to vote on some kind of referendum. “If they’re going to put something before L.A. voters, it’d [also] have to go to all the residents who are part of the school district,” he said.

Small-city leaders say secession is not their only option if they disagree with a mayoral takeover plan. They can always sue.

“It’s always an option,” Prang said. “If you get totally run over, we’re going to fight the best we can to make sure the people of West Hollywood get a fair deal.”

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A far-reaching district

The Los Angeles Unified School District has a convoluted boundary that includes Los Angeles, more than two dozen other cities and swaths of unincorporated county territory. More than 146,000 students and 249,000 registered voters live outside Los Angeles city limits but within the district.

Voters and students in places served by Los Angeles Unified

*--* City Voters Students Bell 7,488 8,149 Bell Gardens 121 0 Beverly Hills 28 18 Carson 38,706 17,499 Commerce 566 63 Cudahy 4,584 6,306 Culver City 5 0 Downey 0 7 El Segundo * 1 Gardena 22,677 8,678 Hawthorne 1,742 322 Huntington Park 11,563 14,034 Inglewood 276 89 Lomita 9,545 2,219 Long Beach 27 32 Los Angeles 1,360,999 537,515 Lynwood 0 9 Maywood 5,038 6,513 Montebello 19 7 Monterey Park 838 199 Rancho Palos Verdes 4,072 237 San Fernando 6,804 5,078 Santa Clarita 0 12 Santa Monica * 16 South Gate 21,957 21,293 Torrance 50 252 Vernon 66 24 West Hollywood 22,228 801 Unincorporated L.A. County 90,606 54,848

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*Los Angeles Unified and the L.A. County Registrar of Voters disagree whether these cities are served by the school district.

Note: An additional 4,318 students live outside LAUSD, but receive permits to attend its schools. Some areas of Calabasas and Glendale are inside the L.A. Unified boundary, but no voters or students live in those areas.

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Sources: L.A. Unified School District, L.A. Co. Registrar of Voters.