Breaking Up Hard to Do for L.A. School District : Education: Dividing the 708-square-mile district into smaller units would cause disputes over students, teachers, property and debts.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials admit being a little nervous about growing sentiment to break up the 708-square-mile school district and warn that such a change would create the same troubles as a bitter divorce.

“There would be fighting over the kids and the property,” Associate Supt. Gabriel Cortina said.

Talk about the breakup has been going on since last summer. But the board’s decision earlier this month to operate schools year-round has triggered a much wider--and more fervent--discussion of the idea.

The cost in terms of money and disruption would be high, say local and state education officials. At stake are the school district’s 610,000 students and 60,000 employees, as well as its $8.5 billion in property and $164 million in unpaid bills.

A breakup would cause some parts of the city to end up with too many students, while other areas would have too many schools, said Los Angeles County Supt. of Schools Stuart E. Gothold.

The change is also likely to create districts populated entirely by ethnic minority groups--a situation certain to be challenged in court, local and state officials say.

Finally, there is no consensus among educators that smaller districts perform any better than their big-city counterparts. In fact, in some areas of Los Angeles County the opposite is true, with some small- and medium-size districts performing worse academically than Los Angeles city schools.

But as with many divorces, the logistic and legal nightmare posed by a breakup does not seem to dampen the enthusiasm of those intent on dissolution. Breakup advocates--armed with statistics showing alarmingly high dropout rates and rock-bottom test scores--say Los Angeles district officials have squandered the right to govern city schools.

Pressure to break up Los Angeles into a number of smaller school districts is growing among widely different groups, from the business community worried about the caliber of the city’s high school graduates to San Fernando Valley parents unhappy over busing and year-round schools.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said he has favored the idea but is willing to wait two or three years to see the results of district efforts to give parents and teachers greater say in running their schools.

“It is disruptive to re-form the district, and it would require a period of turmoil,” Honig said.

Still, Honig conceded that there are big expectations for improved performance in the Los Angeles district.

“The best thing is for them to know that they have to prove to the public they can make it work,” Honig said, referring to school district leaders. “The pressure helps.”

State Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette (R-Northridge) is pushing for a vote on a breakup to be decided by the 1.5-million registered voters who live within the boundaries of the Los Angeles district. La Follette, who has failed in past years to interest the Legislature in forcing a breakup, said she wants the state Board of Education to approve such a vote for 1991.

One of the chief complaints La Follette said she hears from constituents--and the main reason she says she is pushing for a breakup--is that the Los Angeles school board ignores Valley parents. Valley residents elect two representatives on the seven-member board.

But it was not until January, when the school board began to seriously discuss proposals to relieve district crowding by operating schools on year-round schedules, that La Follette’s idea began to generate much community interest.

La Follette was quick to make contact with Valley parents who opposed the year-round proposals. In a news conference three days after the school board decided Feb. 5 in favor of year-round schools, La Follette aide Rob Wilcox and former Los Angeles school board candidate Barbara Romey began recruiting parents and collecting the names and phone numbers of interested people for a computerized list of breakup supporters.

Since the board decision, La Follette has received “many, many phone calls and hundreds of signatures” on petitions supporting a breakup, Wilcox said. La Follette has suggested breaking the district up along the boundaries of its eight administrative regions, creating, for example, two districts in the San Fernando Valley divided along Roscoe Boulevard.

West Valley school board member Julie Korenstein declined to take a stand on the breakup issue, saying that carving up the district was “too important to have a knee-jerk reaction.”

“Once you break up a district, you don’t go back again,” she said.

Korenstein said there were too many variables to weigh. Among them: how the district would be divided and whether the division would affect the district’s funding base and legislative clout.

“I need those questions answered and then I can take a stand,” she said.

She said she did not support dividing the San Fernando Valley into separate districts, as has been proposed. “We’d both be vying for the same piece of pie,” she said.

She said she needed evidence that a divided district would ease overcrowding and improve the quality of education.

“I need to know that small means better,” Korenstein said.

Meanwhile, a downtown Los Angeles attorney, Richard J. Riordan, one among many unhappy voices in the business community, said the district’s slow-moving bureaucracy has rendered it useless and ineffective. He advocates eliminating the current system of central administration and supports giving individual school principals sweeping powers over budgets, hiring and curriculum.

“Basically, the district is too big, too cumbersome and too bureaucratic,” Riordan said.

Riordan got involved after he offered to donate several hundred computers to the district and became entangled in red tape. His frustration peaked when the district became reluctant to accept the gift because of the high costs of staffing and equipping the classrooms to hold them.

“The system needs major changes,” Riordan said.

All of this talk has some in middle- and upper-management at the district’s downtown headquarters a little nervous.

“It’s like any company facing a possible reorganization,” said one school district administrator, who asked not to be named.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Leonard Britton said he knows most of the criticisms leveled by various groups against his district by heart. He has heard them repeated by parents in public meetings and by business leaders in corporate boardrooms where he is often asked to speak.

Business leaders, Britton said, complain about job applicants who lack the reading and writing skills to properly fill out forms, the discipline to show up for work on time and even the common sense to dress properly.

Valley parents have become frustrated about being asked to accommodate the nearly 25,000 students bused in from other parts of the city, Britton said. Many of those parents fear that growing numbers of immigrant children--many of them needing to learn English--will bring down academic standards.

Adding to the district’s troubles, Britton and the school board face as much as $200 million in cuts in next year’s $4-billion budget. Given those circumstances, Britton said, the best the district can hope for is to maintain its position and not fall further behind in academic performance.

In its contract settlement with the teachers union after the strike last spring, the district agreed to share some powers with teachers and parents in newly formed school councils. Although the councils have been touted as a key to improving school performance, the changes probably will not yield measurable results for several years, Britton said.

“The problems we have have evolved over years and will take years to change,” Britton said.

The solution suggested by the district’s critics could take equally as long.

State and county officials estimate that breaking up the Los Angeles school district might take up to five years.

And Richard K. Mason, an attorney for the district, said a breakup could take even longer if challenged in court on the grounds that the change would create racially segregated districts.

La Follette and others argue that there can be little integration in a district where 85% of the students are ethnic minorities. But Mason said the courts are not likely to side with that argument.

“If the primary racial effect of the breakup is to increase segregation, on however small a scale, that would arguably be a significant focal point for potential lawsuits,” Mason said.

Dividing the Los Angeles district along administrative boundaries would create severely crowded inner-city districts and largely uncrowded areas in the Valley and Westside. For some parents, part of the appeal of breaking up the district is the belief that they will be able to halt the busing of inner-city children to schools in the suburbs.

But school board President Jackie Goldberg said it is “fantasy” for parents in less-crowded areas of the city, such as the West Valley, to believe that they can keep up their levels of school spending without the busloads of students who travel from more crowded areas of the city. The state pays districts based on the number of students attending.

“They are missing the point that if you exclude the children, you exclude the resources that come with them,” Goldberg said. “My mother used to say, ‘Be careful for what you ask for.’ If they are successful, the areas where people are most vocal about breaking up the district may have to close at least one-third of their elementary schools.”

Valley schools, which have fewer neighborhood children than the rest of the city, are likely to have higher salary costs because of the large percentage of longtime teachers who work there.

In addition, the district benefits from its large size through cost savings in purchasing such items as food and classroom supplies. Its size also makes it possible to hire a small army of carpenters, painters, electricians and other specialists.

Former Los Angeles schools Supt. Harry Handler said he wonders whether the district’s 60,000 or so employees would be given a choice of which district to work in, should a breakup plan be approved by voters.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson has said the teachers union would fight a breakup of the district because of its effects on the teachers’ contract.

Dividing the property, usually a sticking point in divorce, could be a simpler matter in the breakup of the school district. Robert J. Niccum, the district’s chief realty agent, said that once lines were drawn for new districts, it would be easy to divide the nearly 5,000 acres owned by the district.

Nonetheless, the districts would have to agree on who would get the administrative buildings downtown as well as the district’s central repair shops, maintenance yards and warehouses. Most of those facilities are in pricey downtown Los Angeles.

“All the land is owned free and clear so presumably we would package up the deeds and say, ‘Here you are,’ ” Niccum said. “We did just that when the junior colleges split off from the district in 1969.”

But a breakup of the Los Angeles district would require newly created districts to share in paying off about $160 million in debts incurred by the Los Angeles district in past years, said Henry Jones, district budget director.

Those debts are expected to grow as the district continues its practice of borrowing against future income to pay its bills.

And money troubles will continue to hamper schools throughout the city whether Los Angeles has one or several school districts, Eastside board member Leticia Quezada said. The frustration of parents and community members is not likely to be relieved simply by creating new districts, she said.

“All of the energy spent breaking up the district should be spent on improving academic achievement,” Quezada said.

HOW L.A.’S SCHOOLS MIGHT BE DIVIDED

Supporters of a proposal to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District have suggested the eight administrative regions A-H that now divide the 708-square-mile district become independent school districts.