Racial Balance Issue May Block Valley District : Education: Experts say the cards are stacked against the proposed breakaway from L.A. Unified because of historic desegregation rulings.

Nearly 40 years after the landmark Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ruling forbade racial segregation in public schools, San Fernando Valley parents and community leaders who advocate secession from the massive Los Angeles Unified School District could see their cause run aground on the same issue, legal experts say.

A Valley breakaway--a long-discussed idea revived in the wake of the recent redistricting controversy--would have to meet rigorous county and state guidelines prohibiting a plan that would “promote racial or ethnic discrimination or segregation” in either the parent or offspring district.

Supporters of a Valley district contend that minorities would still outnumber white students on school rolls. The Valley, they argue, is sufficiently diverse within itself and could satisfactorily integrate its 180 campuses.

But experts say the cards may be heavily stacked against a Valley withdrawal.

Using statistics compiled last fall, a Times analysis shows that a separate Valley school system of about 190,000 students would have a white enrollment of close to 27%, or 50,200 students. The 190,000 figure includes about 18,000 students--most of them minority children--who are currently bused into the Valley and who would most likely continue to attend Valley schools.

By contrast, among the 460,000 youngsters remaining in L.A. Unified, white enrollment would correspondingly dwindle from an already low 13% before the split to a mere 7.4% afterward--a drop from 84,000 white students to 33,800, most of them concentrated in the Westside.

Such numbers would form only part of a study on the racial effect of a school district reorganization, observers say. But several attorneys, including experts on school desegregation cases, note that the figures already bode ill for the secession effort.

“The numbers don’t totally answer it, but the numbers start the inquiry,” L.A. school district attorney Richard K. Mason said. “If the numbers are bad, they’d have one down going in.”

“When you go from 13% to 27%, you are doubling the number of whites in that district . . . You are bleaching the district,” said Mark Rosenbaum, general counsel for the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“There’s a difference between a district that is 13% white and 27% white,” said Rosenbaum, who helped press the historic Los Angeles school desegregation lawsuit of the 1970s. In a 27% white district, white students would make up “one out of four, and in a multicultural district, that means that whites may be a dominant number in the classroom, or at least a significant number” compared to a district with 13%, or one out of eight white students.

He added that a “volume of case law” across the country exists where similar breakups have been struck down in court on racial grounds.

“They’d have to rewrite both the California and U.S. Constitution to get this action to be constitutional. I’d be that bold to say that,” said attorney Joseph H. Duff, president of the Los Angeles NAACP.

Legal experts agree that a Valley secession would be a split of unprecedented magnitude, creating a district that would still be the second largest in the state. Besides the segregation issue, a separation proposal would have to demonstrate an equitable division of property and facilities and a negligible increase in costs to the state.

The question of racial impact, however, would perhaps be the most thorny of the various criteria applied by local and California education agencies that must approve any change in district configuration.

The first arbiter of whether carving off the Valley would be discriminatory is the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization, which works under the auspices of the Los Angeles County Office of Education. The committee sends a recommendation to the State Board of Education, which makes the final ruling and approves an election to decide the issue.

But all this is provided that the seven-member Los Angeles school board can first be persuaded to approve a breakup, as is required by state law. Most observers agree that a four-vote majority on the issue would be almost impossible to secure.

“It’s very, very unusual for a board to vote to allow a portion of their area to leave,” said LeRoy Munsch, who works for the State Department of Education division that examines reorganization proposals.

Backers of the Valley pullout, fueled by the recent redistricting that eliminated one of two Valley-based school board seats, have turned to state lawmakers such as Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) in an effort to initiate special legislation for the split. In the early 1970s, a bill to splinter the district was able to pass both houses of the Legislature before being vetoed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

But regardless of how a separate Valley district is accomplished, the issue of segregation would probably be decided in court, lawyers said. Special legislation by its very nature may be more prone to attract scrutiny on the federal level.

“That would present a much more attractive case for an attack in the federal courts,” said Thomas Atkins, a Brooklyn-based attorney known nationally for his work on school segregation cases, including lawsuits brought in San Francisco, Boston and Detroit. “At the federal level, the likelihood of it being stopped would be much greater.”

Based on the overall numbers, a Valley secession “would be very clearly racially segregating,” he said. But he cautioned that “whether or not it would be impermissibly segregated is another question.

“This is not your typical case of territorial segregation. The result of the process is itself going to be predominantly non-white, so on the face of it, it doesn’t appear to be a move made on the basis of racial issues,” he said.

Clayton H. Parker, whose Tustin law firm mostly handles district reorganization disputes, called the outcome of a segregation lawsuit “a tossup.”

Proponents of the split, such as school board member Julie Korenstein, have pointed out that a district that is 27% white and more than half Latino cannot be called white-controlled. They also contend that a 13% white district--L.A. Unified’s current status--is no more integrated than the 7% white district that it would become after the breakup.

“We have an ethnically diverse community” in the Valley, said attorney Robert L. Scott, president of United Chambers of Commerce, a business coalition spearheading the secession effort. “I have trouble understanding how you necessarily have to have ‘X’ number of white kids in a class to make it a good class.”

He and others argue that a separate Valley district could integrate its own schools, probably by busing students from the heavily minority areas of the East Valley to campuses in the West Valley.

But Duff of the NAACP criticized the idea, describing it as blind to the fact that the remainder of L.A. Unified would be further hampered in its attempts to desegregate with such a low proportion of white students.

“They’re creating integration for the Valley and leaving the rest of the city more segregated,” he said. “They make a solvable problem for themselves, but they’ve left the city to fend for themselves.”

Duff also cited as detrimental to the breakaway drive the “historical backdrop” of ethnic isolation in L.A. Unified’s schools and the Valley’s angry opposition in the late 1970s to mandatory busing to relieve segregation.

Any separate Valley district would have to adhere to desegregation plans already in place, according to Peter James, the attorney who represented the district through much of the so-called Crawford racial segregation lawsuit of the 1970s. This would most likely include the continuation of busing for about 18,000 students--most of them from the inner city--who attend schools in the Valley.

Scott and other advocates of a Valley district have expressed their support for interdistrict busing as a means of maintaining the current ethnic distribution of students in L.A. Unified.

However, legal experts say the practice would raise questions that could doom the secession proposal.

One issue would be money. The state pays school districts a set amount per pupil based on average daily attendance. If L.A. Unified bused students into the Valley, who would receive the cash that goes with those students? Who would pay for the busing?

Such issues, not yet worked out by Valley secession leaders, are important because they directly affect a district’s budget and, by extension, the quality of education the bused-in children would receive, said Carol Smith, a lawyer who helped represent the plaintiffs in the so-called Rodriguez case, which alleged inequitable district funding for schools in poorer areas.

Also, busing between the Valley district and L.A. Unified might resurrect the controversial concept of a metropolitan desegregation plan encompassing the entire county. A draft of such a proposal introduced in 1979 drew vociferous opposition from suburban communities.

“Somebody might bring a new lawsuit and they might say, for example, if we’re going to have two new districts, why don’t we include all neighboring districts and get a metropolitan plan at the same time?” James said.

“We have always supported interdistrict permits, but not just for the Valley,” Duff said. “That gives you a chance to really do something about desegregation. Just doing something for the Valley is not a complete treatment; it’s just a partial treatment.”

Because a metropolitan plan might be revived, drawing in wealthier enclaves such as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, some observers predict that these smaller school districts would quietly but strenuously work against a Valley split in order to keep themselves out of reach of a wider desegregation suit.

Those districts “are going to get nervous,” said attorney Parker of Tustin.

School’s Ethnic Makeup

L.A. Unified / Fall 1991 White: 83,988 / 13% Minority*: 563,338 / 87% Total Enrollment: 647,326

Separate Valley and L.A. Unified Districts White: 33,788 / 7.4% Minority*: 425,807 / 92.6% L.A. Unified: 459,595 White: 50,200 / 26.7% Minority*: 137,531 / 73.3% Valley: 187,731** * Includes American Indian / Alaskan native, Asian, Black, Filipino, Hispanic, Pacific Islander.

** Includes 18,000 students currently bused into the Valley from other parts of L.A. Unified, most of whom are minority students.