Rival Plan to School Board Redistricting Advances : Education: Opponents of elimination of a second Valley seat will count petition signatures in their effort to place a measure on the June ballot.

Organizers of an effort to overturn a redistricting plan that diluted San Fernando Valley representation on the Los Angeles Board of Education said they have enough signatures to qualify a rival plan for the June ballot.

But the group said it doesn’t yet know if it has a large enough cushion in case a large number of signatures are disqualified.

“We needed 48,000,” said Cecelia Mansfield, president of the Coalition Against Unfair School Elections, or CAUSE. “What we’re trying to determine is if we have enough over 48,000 to cover any invalid signatures.”

CAUSE is hoping to toss out a controversial redistricting plan approved by the Los Angeles City Council in July that eliminated one of two “Valley seats” on the school board by redrawing the seven districts so that two would have majorities of Latino voters.

Petitions continued to trickle in to six CAUSE drop-off points throughout the Valley on Thursday, the unofficial cutoff date for volunteers to turn in petitions.

The formal deadline for turning the petitions in is Dec. 31, but Mansfield and other organizers plan to count signatures over the weekend and meet Monday to decide whether to continue the effort to qualify for the June ballot.

Even if the group has enough signatures, Mansfield said, there is a growing feeling within CAUSE that it should delay its ballot drive until the June, 1994, statewide election.

That would allow CAUSE to capitalize on the interest generated by the school-voucher initiative, which proposes allowing parents to spend tax dollars to send their children to the schools of their choice, public or private.

“We might gain a lot tactically by waiting for that ballot,” Mansfield said.

At the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn. in Van Nuys on Thursday--one of the CAUSE drop-off spots--office manager Shirley Nixon pointed to a stack of about 100 petitions that had been returned the past few days. Some of the petitions were full; others had just a few signatures on them.

Bernadette Friedman, who arrived with an armful of petitions, estimated that she had about 300 signatures.

Friedman, whose son, Howard, is a seventh-grader at Patrick Henry Junior High School in Granada Hills, said gathering signatures was complicated by the number of school-related issues now under discussion. Another proposal, prompted in part by furor over the redistricting, is for Valley schools to secede from the nation’s second-largest school system.

But, Friedman said, “I think once people understood what it was about, they were willing to sign it.”

CAUSE was formed by a cross-section of Valley organizations, from the United Chambers of Commerce and San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors to the Korean Parent Assn. of the San Fernando Valley and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.