Foes of School Board Remapping Get Help : Education: City Council delay gives Valley group time to act. They also receive access to data to use for alternative plan.

San Fernando Valley critics of a school board redistricting proposal got a double-barreled boost for their cause Friday: more time to rally their forces, and access to the tools needed to compose their own alternative plans.

Opponents contend the plan, under which only one of the seven school board seats in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be an all-Valley seat, would give the Valley a disproportionately weak voice, and votes of Valley residents would be diluted by inclusion in districts stretching far out of the area.

The plan’s foes got their first break when a City Hall vote on the redistricting plan was delayed.

“We got a breather,” said Cecelia Mansfield, a 31st District PTA vice president, after the Los Angeles City Council failed to muster the 10-member quorum needed to do business Friday. The remap matter will be taken up again Tuesday when all but one of the council’s 15 members are expected to be present.

Earlier, it had been expected that the plan would receive preliminary approval Friday and be ready for final adoption next Friday. The proposal is largely the work of Councilman Richard Alatorre and a coalition of Latino civil rights groups and is aimed at the election of at least two Latinos to the board.

Then, in yet another break late Friday, foes of the plan won access to help from the city’s redistricting specialist and his computerized demographic material. This should allow the critics to craft possible alternative remap plans that might be less detrimental to the Valley--yet still be legal, according to city officials.

“Finally now there’s cooperation from City Hall,” said school board member Julie Korenstein, a vocal foe of the Alatorre plan. “I only wish it had come sooner because our timeline is so short. Still, I’m more optimistic now than I have been in a while that we can come up with a compromise.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky played a key role in breaking the logjam, according to Korenstein.

Yaroslavsky said he believed that the political “situation is very fluid” now with regard to the Alatorre plan.

“If the Valley coalition can come up with a better plan, there’d be no reason not to support it,” he added.

Korenstein has been a leader of a loose-knit coalition formed to oppose the plan, which has the backing of the council’s redistricting leadership. By a 4-0 vote Monday, the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Redistricting endorsed the plan that is now officially before the full council.

Yaroslavsky, a member of the committee, was among the four voting for the plan.

But this plan would weaken the Valley’s clout on school issues by reducing from two to one the number of school board members elected from Valley-based constituencies, according to Mansfield, Korenstein and other critics.

The plan would thrust Korenstein into a district that would run from Porter Ranch to Westchester and force her into a political fight for survival with fellow school board member Mark Slavkin, who would live in the same district.

The plan’s architects have been civil rights groups seeking greater representation for Latinos. Only one Latino now sits on the Los Angeles school board. With their redistricting plan, Latinos will be able to elect two board members for certain, civil rights leaders say.

Under the existing plan, the Valley consists of two districts: Korenstein’s and Roberta Weintraub’s.

Under the Alatorre plan, Korenstein’s West Valley seat would be merged with Slavkin’s Westside district; Weintraub’s seat would become the only all-Valley district, and parts of two other districts would be brought into the Valley--one of these based in the Central City, the other on the Eastside. The latter would become a predominantly Latino seat, stretching from Boyle Heights to Sylmar.

“Given the momentum of the past week, it could be to our advantage,” Mansfield said of the delay obtained Friday even as she acknowledged it will still be an uphill fight to block adoption of a plan.

To date, only council members Joy Picus and Joel Wachs, both from the Valley, and Councilman Nate Holden have said they will fight the Alatorre plan.

Possibly joining the foes of the plan Tuesday could be Councilman Hal Bernson, another Valley lawmaker, who is vacationing in Europe. Bernson’s top aide has said he will advise his boss to vote against the plan.

Meanwhile, the Valley critics charged Friday morning that City Hall lawmakers had stymied their efforts to gain access to the city’s redistricting expert, David Ely, his demographic data, remap criteria and computers so they could test whether a better alternative could be devised.

“These are taxpayer resources and they should be made available to us,” said Betty Blake, a PTA executive board member.

The PTA group and its allies--including the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley, Valley Organized in Community Efforts, and the Valley chapters of the National Council of Negro Women and the Black American Political Assn. of California--have proposed their own redistricting plan, but it was rejected as legally inadequate by the Latino civil rights groups and the city’s legal advisers.

The city attorney’s office has said that the city wants to avoid a court fight with the Latino groups, who have said they will sue under federal civil rights laws if they are not satisfied with the plan adopted.

Mansfield said it is very difficult for a private group to process the huge amounts of data needed to create a redistricting plan without special assistance and that the city’s refusal to give her group access to the tools it needs to explore possible compromise plans was unfair.

But by late Friday afternoon, this obstacle appeared to have been removed when Korenstein reported that Ely had been cleared by his council bosses to meet with the Valley group.

Ely could not be reached for comment. But Yaroslavsky confirmed that Ely had been directed to meet Monday with the Valley coalition to discuss alternative plans.