La Follette Begins Drive to Break Up L.A. Unified

Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette said Wednesday she will privately create a plan to break up the Los Angeles school district, which she hopes to present to local voters.

Her strategy would bypass the state Legislature, where she has repeatedly been stymied on the issue.

La Follette (R-Northridge) announced that she has created a five-member panel that will hold hearings in the summer and fall on how to accomplish the breakup. Called the Los Angeles Task Force for Better Education, it will hear from parents, students, educators and community leaders and present her with a plan for creating as many as 15 new districts out of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The first hearing is scheduled for Aug. 15.

A reorganization plan would have to be endorsed by the State Board of Education and the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization. It would then have to be approved by voters.

Robert Wilcox, a member of La Follette’s staff who will serve as executive director of the task force, said a 1988 poll of city voters paid for by La Follette found that 52% favored reorganization, 17% were opposed and the others were undecided.

“Los Angeles Unified is failing our young people,” Wilcox said. “Dropout rates are at epidemic proportions. School campuses are plagued by gun-toting, drug-dealing thugs. And yearly the Los Angeles school district spends $3 billion for which there is little accountability.”

The only hope of dealing with those problems, he said, “lies in curbing the massive bureaucracy and returning control to the communities.”

The proposal drew immediate opposition. Jackie Goldberg, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said it would be costly, result in numerous lawsuits and force the closure of numerous under-enrolled San Fernando Valley schools.

She said breaking up the massive district, whose $3.4-billion budget is larger than those of 18 states, would neither improve student achievement nor increase parents’ influence over school district decisions.

“I don’t think it would serve the public’s interest at all,” she said.

Union Leader

Wayne Johnson, president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles, also criticized the idea of breaking up the school district.

“You would be creating several smaller districts similar to Compton and Inglewood and other small districts that have the same problems we have even though they are a tenth our size,” he said. “I think it is a political thing much more than an honest attempt to improve education.”

A $98,000 study done in 1982 by the Los Angeles-based Evaluation and Training Institute acknowledged that the district’s size was a problem. The study, funded by the state Assembly, concluded that district operations were inefficient and that the quality of education was marginal.

But the study recommended against carving up the district, saying it would result in greater racial segregation and probably would be challenged on constitutional grounds.

During the early 1980s, La Follette bills that would have allowed the Valley to form its own school district died in committee. She then tried unsuccessfully to gather 100,000 voter signatures to accomplish the same thing.

Bill Turned Down

In 1984, the Assembly Education Committee turned down a bill that would have paid for a study of the idea. The same committee last year voted 11 to 3 in favor of spending $250,000 to study the reorganization idea, but that bill died in the Ways and Means Committee.

La Follette’s panel consists of Jane Boeckmann, president of World Communications, which publishes Valley magazine; Ray Johnson, the Inglewood police chief; Edward W. Lee, president of the Chinese American Citizens’ Alliance of Los Angeles; Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, and Richard C. Williams, director of the Corrine A. Seeds University Elementary School at UCLA.