EDUCATION HERMOSA BEACH : School Board Backs Plan for Single 3-City District

The battle over reorganizing the beach cities’ schools gained a new--and controversial--wrinkle this week, when Hermosa Beach trustees endorsed a plan to dismantle their tiny one-school district and create a single school system encompassing their city, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach.

The unanimous decision Wednesday before about 75 parents and teachers was greeted with a mixture of resignation and dismay--resignation from parents who had once hoped to save their cash-strapped school, and dismay from trustees in the other two cities.

“They know the other districts will never go for total unification,” fumed Redondo Beach Board President Bart Swanson. Redondo Beach trustees, he said, have been working for more than a year on a plan to create a kindergarten through 12th-grade district for that city, and Manhattan Beach trustees want to merge their schools with Hermosa Beach to create a second unified district.

If school officials in the three cities could agree on a unification proposal, they could bring it to the local voters within a year, he said.

“This is just a stall,” Swanson said. “This is just one small school district that has decided to hold everything up.”

Currently there are four school districts for the South Bay’s three beach cities: an elementary district in each city, and a high school district for Redondo Union High School and Manhattan Beach’s Mira Costa High School. Tiny Hermosa Beach, which is flanked by the other two cities, has no high school of its own, but has clung tenaciously to its local district, despite a shrinking budget and years of low enrollment, which eventually forced the closure of all but one of the city’s schools.

Unification has been under serious discussion among the four districts for almost two years. The matter first came up in 1989, when the South Bay Union High School District invited the elementary districts to consider merging with it in an effort to shore up sagging finances.

But the debate has been emotional and fraught with longstanding divisions among the three beach cities. Redondo Beach trustees, for instance, decided soon after the talks began to try to create their own unified school district, because they feared only one high school would be needed in a new consolidated district and that Redondo Union might be closed.

For nearly a year, volunteers in Redondo Beach have been circulating petitions for a plan that would pull Redondo Union High School away from the high school district and unify it with the city’s elementary schools for a Redondo Beach kindergarten through 12th-grade district.

Left to their own devices, the other three school districts hired a consultant to help them decide on a reorganization plan. The consultant recommended in May that Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach merge their schools, pull Mira Costa High School from the high school district and create a unified school system of their own.

The Manhattan Beach trustees support that plan. The high school district--which would be dismantled under the two-district scenario--has agreed to go along with whatever the elementary districts want.

But the Hermosa Beach board has refused to commit to the two-district plan. Part of the reason has to do with the reluctance of Hermosa Beach to be the only one of the three cities to be left without a school system of its own.

For decades, through baby booms and times of dwindling enrollment alike, Hermosa Beach has clung stubbornly to the notion of home rule for its schools. In recent years, however, the district--like many others in the state--has had to cut one program after another because of state-level budget cuts. Meanwhile, enrollment has risen sharply in recent years, crowding the classrooms of Hermosa Beach’s one school and leaving its faculty short-staffed and overworked.

“We have good singers here, and we don’t have a good music program,” Angela Jones, the school’s business manager, told the board. “We have good artists here, but we don’t have a real art program. We have children who can build things with their hands, and we have nothing to offer them. If you want a future for your kids, think about unification.”

But to reap what unification might offer in better programs and economies of scale, the districts would have to overcome longstanding and lingering differences that still haunt the beach cities.

“Manhattan has always treated us like ugly sister--’You can play with us, but we make the rules,’ ” charged Pete Tucker, a Hermosa Beach parent and Little League coach. “If we go with Manhattan, I’m afraid they’ll steamroller right over us.”

Hermosa Beach Trustee Joe Mark urged parents to overcome such “them and us” attitudes but added that he believed a single, unified district might allow Hermosa Beach to take advantage of unification without expense to its local identity.

“You end up with just one administration, but Redondo Beach still has its school, Manhattan Beach has its school, and we have ours,” he said.

Moreover, he said, many in his city believe a single district is inevitable, and a two-district plan simply prolongs the debate.

The decision Wednesday will now force each city to come up with an independent reorganization plan and gather sufficient signatures to qualify it for consideration by state and county education authorities. Any plan that qualifies and passes muster at the state level would then have to be placed on a local ballot and voted on.

To become eligible for consideration by the State Board of Education, any reorganization plan must be accompanied by petitions bearing the signatures of 25% of the registered voters in the cities involved.

Redondo Beach trustees said they need about 10,000 signatures to qualify their plan, but so far have gathered only about 6,000, because voters in the city have difficulty grasping the complexities of school management.

Manhattan Beach trustees, who want to unify with Hermosa Beach, would need the signatures of about 5,500 voters in Manhattan Beach and about 3,000 voters in Hermosa Beach, if they were to decide to press forward with their plan.

And Hermosa Beach trustees would need to match the efforts of both those cities, gathering about 18,500 signatures.

If all four districts could agree on a configuration, there would be no need for petition drives. The plan would go directly to the state level, and, if approved, would be sent back to the voters.

Hermosa Beach Board President Mary Lou Weiss acknowledged that Hermosa Beach’s task is daunting and said her board may be forced to compromise in a few months, if the petition drive fails to gather steam. But she said the slow pace of Redondo Beach’s petition drive may be due to a lack of support for the two-district plan in that city.

“We’re not taking the easy road by any means, but we’re doing what we think is best,” she said.