Formula for Hostility Toward Schools?

Los Angeles saw a particularly nasty display of ethnic politics last week when City Council members drew new districts for the Los Angeles Unified School District, as they are required to do under the City Charter. Unless everyone involved now works to repair the damage, it could have a negative effect on the city’s already troubled public schools--something nobody wants.

Briefly, the fight stemmed from the effort to draw lines for seven school board seats so that Latinos--whose children make up the majority of students in the city’s schools--would have a better chance of electing a second Latino to the board.

Latino civil rights groups had threatened to sue unless this was done. Because Latinos using similar lawsuits previously forced favorable redistricting of both the council and the county Board of Supervisors, most council members were willing (if not particularly happy) to accommodate them. The problem is how the council went about its task.

Rather than trying to carve out a new district in the central city, where immigration has swelled Latino population in recent years, council members focused on the San Fernando Valley.

The result was a political battle that saw one of the two current school board districts in the Valley cut up so that the heavily Latino areas on the Valley’s eastern end were linked to two new Latino districts close to downtown, one on the Eastside and the other in the central city. Although the gerrymandering involved is fairly obvious, it is permissible under the standards set by the Voting Rights Act in 1975.

But while the new district lines are probably legal, one wonders if they are wise.

The Valley historically, and not without some justification, has felt aggrieved in its dealings with downtown’s powers that be. This latest battle could generate new efforts for that part of the city to secede or at least incorporate a school district of its own. And even if such efforts fail, as they have in the past, could they stimulate more hostility toward the public schools? And will the Valley’s many homeowners now be even less inclined to vote for new school bonds and other education tax measures?

To avert such worst-case scenarios this city’s emerging Latino political leadership must prove it won’t treat the Valley like a colony, as previous political leaders sometimes did.

There are Latino neighborhoods in the Valley, from Canoga Park to Pacoima, and they are growing through immigration from Latin America. They, and the rest of the Valley, would be well-served if a Latino from the other side of the Hollywood Hills were elected when the new “Latino school board seat” opens up in 1993.