Panel Favors Broader Redistricting Study : Schools: A state committee wants to look at reorganization on a statewide basis, rather than focusing on just the Los Angeles district.

Opening a new front in the fight to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District, a state Board of Education committee Thursday recommended spending $250,000 to develop models for school district reorganizations throughout the state.

Advocates of dividing the Los Angeles district hope that by approaching the issue statewide, they can win support from legislators who must approve the funding and are wary of focusing only on Los Angeles schools.

The Board of Education’s Policy and Planning Committee voted 4 to 1 to recommend that the full board, scheduled to meet today, support development of guidelines to reorganize extremely small school districts as well as large.

“I’m encouraged that the entire board will accept it,” said Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette (R-Northridge), who for years has maintained that the 610,000-student Los Angeles district is too large.

Still, La Follette must persuade skeptical legislators, facing shortages in state revenues, to earmark the funds in the state budget being drawn up for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Gov. George Deukmejian in January set aside $250,000 in his proposed state spending plan to study reorganizing the Los Angeles district. But members of two legislative budget subcommittees this week voiced reservations about appropriating the money to look at that district only.

Assemblyman Robert J. Campbell (D-Richmond), chairman of a key Ways and Means subcommittee that reviewed La Follette’s proposal, cautioned that the state “ought to be careful about telling a local district what to do.”

As a result, La Follette on Thursday sought to round up support for her compromise statewide proposal. She also suggested that if more money is necessary, it could be provided by private corporations.

Voting against the proposal was Kenneth L. Peters of Tarzana, former superintendent of schools in Beverly Hills. Peters said he agrees that the Los Angeles district has too many students. But he said the state Board of Education does not have its own staff to oversee the development of plans to overhaul school boundaries.

“I don’t know how you resolve it . . . for $250,000,” Peters said.

In contrast, board President Joseph Carrabino of Encino, a professor emeritus at the UCLA Graduate School of Management, said he supports the appropriation and breakup of the district. Carrabino, who is not a member of the committee but attended the hearing, described the district as “a big Pentagon-type structure that’s paralyzed. It’s muscle-bound.”

Ronald Prescott, a lobbyist for the Los Angeles district, defended the district as well-administered and questioned whether smaller districts could be operated as efficiently. Prescott said the district is taking a wait-and-see attitude on the results of any study conducted by the state.

“I think our bottom line is what the plan would produce,” he said. “Would it in effect help us achieve more for the kids?”

In the past, Los Angeles school officials have also said attempts to break up the district would probably face legal challenge on grounds that such a plan would create more segregated districts.

On Wednesday, a task force formed by La Follette reported that dividing the Los Angeles district into at least eight and as many as 49 smaller districts would improve academic performance and reduce the number of dropouts.

According to La Follette, the report showed that the district is “incapable of addressing the legitimate education needs of Los Angeles-area students.”

For much of the past decade, La Follette has championed plans to restructure the district. In 1988, a La Follette bill to appropriate $215,000 for a study on school district size failed in the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

Six years earlier, the Legislature allocated $100,000 for a study that, among other things, concluded that the best alternative would be to dissolve the Los Angeles Unified School District and other districts in Los Angeles County and create a number of new, autonomous ones.