VALLEY PUBLIC SCHOOLS : Backers of Drive to Split Up L. A. District See Best Chance Yet in ’93

With a new national political landscape on the horizon and local public education in turmoil, 1993 may finally be the watershed year for those who hope to see the San Fernando Valley wrest control of its 170 campuses away from the gargantuan Los Angeles Unified School District.

Fueled by strong discontent over public education and what they perceive to be the Valley’s inferior standing within the nation’s second-largest school system, state lawmakers, parents and educators are poised to try writing into law a separate Valley school district--or perhaps an even more radical reorganization of Los Angeles schools. The idea has floated about for decades without success, but its advocates are newly optimistic.

“I think we’ve got the best chance we’ve ever had,” said Jill Reiss, a Northridge homemaker who is vice chairwoman of a business and community coalition devoted to creating a Valley school district. “It’s really what the people want. The mood of the country is that people want to see some real systemic change.”

To Reiss’s delight, state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), the powerful president pro tem who was elected to a Valley seat this year, agrees with her--and has pledged to sponsor legislation to help create a separate Valley school system in the wake of a bitter redistricting battle last summer.

But Roberti’s thinking has already changed slightly in the run-up to the target month of February for introducing a bill. In an interview last week, Roberti said he is now exploring the possibility of carving the Los Angeles school district into even smaller slices, including two districts within the Valley instead of one, perhaps divided along the San Diego Freeway.

“Right now the objective is to reduce the size of the Los Angeles Unified School District more than it is to have any one area separated,” the lawmaker said. The final version of the bill could, he said, incorporate a more wide-ranging fracture than just north and south of Mulholland Drive.

Just to what degree he should splinter a school system that covers 708 square miles and serves 640,000 students is one of the thorny questions that Roberti and his staff will have to answer as they draft their legislation. They must also navigate hazardous legal and procedural waters that have sunk past efforts to break up the Los Angeles district, on issues ranging from court-ordered racial integration to an equitable distribution of assets and liabilities.

But regardless of whether the Valley survives the process as a unified entity, supporters of the Valley secession drive say the battle for local educational autonomy has been irrevocably joined and may set the stage for a more radical restructuring of Los Angeles schools.

“If it breaks down into more than one district in the Valley, I don’t think there’s anyone opposed to that,” said attorney Robert L. Scott, president of the Valley’s United Chambers of Commerce. The organization is in the forefront of the coalition spearheading the breakaway campaign.

“One of the things we want to do is keep our goals modest,” he said. “So you take that central step in making a Valley school district, and if you feel comfortable, and if the sky doesn’t fall, then going further is something we would be open to.”

The move to split up the Los Angeles district was revived this summer after an acrimonious redistricting fight eliminated one of two Valley-based seats on the Board of Education. The new boundaries, approved by the Los Angeles City Council in July, preserve only one mid-Valley constituency while dividing the rest of the Valley among three board members.

Critics of the new map contend that the Valley’s influence on education has been considerably sapped, but supporters say the reapportionment increases Latino voter clout on the school board in accordance with federal law. Some argue a thinly veiled racism lies behind the secession drive, accusing its backers of trying to undermine Latino political gains.

“To talk about secession now . . . it’s just political opportunism,” said Ruben Rodriguez, a San Fernando resident and chairman of the Valley chapter of the Latino Redistricting Coalition.

Rodriguez and others have labeled Roberti’s newfound support for breaking up the school district as a maneuver of “political expediency” that dodges the real issue of how to increase the quality of Los Angeles public schools, both within the Valley and beyond.

“No one has said how this will improve the education for the children,” said Rodriguez, who predicted that the secession effort would prove “real divisive at a point in time when people should be pulling together.”

“The real issue is more money at the state level rather than people cannibalizing each other,” he said. “The real issue is smaller classrooms, not smaller districts. How are they going to accomplish that? By doubling the bureaucracy? Very definitely L.A. Unified has to be restructured--give each school their budget, give each principal their budget, decentralizing to the local level. That’s power.”

Roberti acknowledged that a separate Valley school district, with 190,000 students, would still be the state’s second largest after the remaining Los Angeles district.

“Every district over 100,000 students is too big,” he said, but added, “I firmly believe a Valley district is far preferable to a huge metropolitan district. It’s not the optimum, but it’s preferable.”

A hearing on a Los Angeles district fission has been scheduled for sometime in February in downtown Los Angeles, to be headed by state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), the influential chairman of the state Senate Education Committee. Although Roberti’s office had previously planned to hold two hearings in January, one downtown and one in the Valley, aides said they decided to consolidate the two so Hart could preside over the hearing.

Backers of a split predict that the coming year will finally signal at least the start of the realization of a long-held dream.

“I really think legislation will hit the floor this year,” Reiss said. “Whether it will get through or not, the idea will get bandied about. . . . There’s no confidence anymore in the district.”

“A good idea is going to find its fruition sooner or later, and it’s a better idea today because the district has become more unmanageable,” Scott added. “We have put together a group of people who are active in the Valley on all sides of the political spectrum, and that’s key to making something like this happen.”