Leuzinger Cuts 375 Students From Its Attendance Rolls : Education: Students could not prove they lived in the district. Teachers hail the move, but some parents say the action unfairly targets black students.

More than 375 students who attended Leuzinger High School last semester were dropped from the school’s attendance rolls this summer because they were unable to prove that they live in the Centinela Valley Union High School District.

In a sweeping study conducted during July and August, four retired teachers, along with Supt. Tom Barkelew, rang more than 6,000 doorbells in the district to verify the residency status of every student registered to attend Leuzinger High, Hawthorne High and R. K. Lloyde Continuation High.

The study, which included incoming freshmen, found that the district had incorrect addresses on 581 students enrolled at Leuzinger High alone. Of those, only about 200 students were able to prove their residency in the district; the rest had either moved away and neglected to tell school officials or never lived in the district.

Enrollment findings for students at Hawthorne High have not yet been compiled, but school officials expect to do so by the end of the year.

District officials do not know how many of the former Leuzinger students had submitted false addresses to attend the school, but they suspect the number is large. Many students from Los Angeles and Compton schools have been attracted to Centinela Valley because of its top-rated athletic programs and because its campuses are considered safer than those found elsewhere, they said. The district encompasses Hawthorne, Lawndale and Lennox.

Teachers this week said they welcomed the study.

However, some black community activists, who have been critical of the predominantly Latino school board, attacked the project, saying it was designed to rid the district of black students.

District officials deny those charges, saying they simply need to get a handle on overcrowding. They also say they have no way of knowing the racial makeup of students dropped from the schools’ attendance rolls.

The attendance roster “looks very clean, the cleanest it’s been in a long time,” Barkelew told the trustees at a board meeting Tuesday night. He described Leuzinger’s enrollment problem as “ridiculous” and said it “should have been cleared up long ago.”

But, he added, the problem is not completely resolved. The number of students who line up after school at bus stops headed out of the district indicates that the schools still have students who don’t belong there, he said.

“We still have some cleanup to do in terms of students who are still catching buses on El Segundo (Boulevard) and Rosecrans (Avenue), but we will approach that as the school year progresses,” Barkelew said.

Teachers in the racially divided district, which has been troubled for the past couple of years by unrest and student fighting, have long said they believed the high schools’ problems stemmed in part from overcrowding caused by out-of-district students.

Nevertheless, several teachers at Leuzinger, which now has 2,837 students, said they were surprised to find out they had been teaching so many students who live elsewhere. They also said they welcomed the clamp-down because it reduced class size and campus congestion.

“The school is like night and day compared to last year,” said Steve Carnes, Leuzinger’s athletic director. “Things are going really, really well. There is not such a large number of kids wandering around everywhere.”

Leuzinger social studies teacher Nancy Nuesseler, a Centinela Valley Secondary Teachers Assn. representative, agreed, saying the school has had “one of the smoothest starts that we’ve had in a really long time.”

She said many of the district’s worst troublemakers were students who lived outside the district and that one of the problems of trying to educate them is that their parents are more difficult to reach and are not part of the community the school is supposed to serve.

“Some of the kids we’ve had have not been the best of students,” Nuesseler said. “By making sure we have an honest enrollment of kids in the district, then we can deal effectively with this community. Let’s face it, we have a major problem communicating with parents. And that’s one of the reasons.”

But at the board meeting Tuesday, community activist Lionel Broussard, co-founder of an organization called the Committee for Racial Free Education, said the enrollment study was a way to “get black kids out of the district.”

“You have removed a disproportionate number of blacks from the district by denying requests for inter-district transfers,” Broussard said. He was referring to the board’s decision not to grant transfers to former students who cannot show residency in the district.

The group’s other co-founder, Adrain Briggs, told the trustees he received phone calls from two or three out-of-district parents who were denied permits to continue to send their children to Centinela Valley schools.

“I think if you’re going to deny a permit, it would be decent of you to provide some kind of reason,” Briggs said.

Trustee Michael Escalante said the crackdown on students living outside the district had nothing to do with their race or ethnicity but was dictated by financial considerations. Although the state pays the district for every child who attends its schools, the funding does not cover the cost of educating every student.

“It isn’t enough to make up when you don’t have the room or teachers to handle the students and you have a tight budget as we have,” he said.