School Board Fight on Hold : Redistricting: Coalition hoping to scrap a controversial plan defers until June, 1994, its campaign to place alternative map before voters.

A San Fernando Valley coalition attempting to overturn recently redrawn Los Angeles school board boundaries announced Tuesday that it has deferred until June, 1994, a campaign to place an alternative map before city voters.

The Coalition Against Unfair School Elections, or CAUSE, had hoped to put a citywide initiative on the upcoming June ballot that would scrap a controversial redistricting plan approved last summer. The redistricting was designed to give Latino neighborhoods control over at least two of the board’s seven seats, but accomplished that goal by eliminating one of the two all-Valley districts.

But CAUSE officials said Tuesday that they do not have enough signatures to meet Thursday’s deadline for submitting ballot proposals and will continue circulating petitions to qualify the measure for the June, 1994, primary election.

“We have decided to continue our circulation efforts in order to increase awareness throughout the city about this important issue and to increase our margin for error in the submission of qualified signatures,” CAUSE President Cecelia Mansfield said in a prepared statement.

The group’s members had been working since just before Thanksgiving to collect 75,000 signatures to ensure that they had the 48,000 officially validated signatures needed to qualify the measure. The decision to put off the initiative drive for a year--taken by the group’s board of directors Tuesday--came after a weekend spent counting signatures gathered by Christmas Eve, the group’s informal cutoff date.

About 50,000 signatures were tabulated, Mansfield said. Organizers now have through March to canvass for additional signatures and submit the petitions to the city clerk’s office for the June, 1994, ballot.

CAUSE officials, who had originally hoped to begin circulating petitions at the beginning of November but were delayed by the amount of preliminary work needed, said the short six-week time frame was the biggest factor in preventing the group from qualifying the initiative for the June election this year.

“We were literally handing out petitions that were still warm from printing,” Mansfield said. “If we had begun seriously circulating on Nov. 1, we would have had three weeks or more before Thanksgiving before people started getting into the panic mode over the holidays. Once it gets past Thanksgiving it’s asking an awful lot of volunteers to take the time” to gather signatures.

Mansfield also described the coalition’s move to defer the initiative as a tactical as well as realistic one, saying that a closely watched statewide school voucher initiative--which would give parents tax-funded vouchers to send children to any school they choose, public or private--would help generate “a massive . . . turnout of school-oriented voters” for the June, 1994, election.

However, she said it is difficult to gauge how those in favor of the voucher measure would vote on the remap initiative. In fact, the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn., one of the organizations spearheading the CAUSE effort, is adamantly opposed to school vouchers but supports changing the district boundaries.

“The PTA perspective will be to vote ‘no’ on the statewide initiative, ‘yes’ on the local,” said Mansfield, a past president of the 31st District PTSA.

“It’s a calculated risk” to pair the two issues on the same ballot, she acknowledged. “I wish I had a crystal ball and could predict. Talk to me the day after the election in June of 1994 and I’ll tell you if we made an error or not.”

CAUSE, a coalition of civic, parent and educational organizations, launched its campaign after an acrimonious reapportionment battle that resulted in the elimination of one of the two Valley-based seats on the seven-member board of education in July. The redistricting plan approved by the Los Angeles City Council preserved a mid-Valley seat but split representation of the rest of the Valley among three board members.

CAUSE officials contend that the plan weakens the Valley’s influence. But supporters of the new districts say they are designed to give Latino voters long-overdue control over a second board seat in a public school system in which the majority of students are Latinos.

Ruben Rodriguez, chairman of the Valley chapter of the Latino Redistricting Coalition, said his organization will continue to fight the campaign to overturn the new boundaries.

“For them to postpone it is great, because that gives us an opportunity to educate more people on how it’s detrimental to the Latino community and how it doesn’t really improve education,” he said of the initiative drive.

Rodriguez also criticized the view that Valley power on the school board had been diluted, citing that the number of representatives with Valley constituents had increased.

“We have four representatives now that have a vested interest in the Valley,” he said. “We have four votes on any legitimate Valley issue.”

The CAUSE initiative would institute new boundaries for the 1995 board of education elections, including a return to two constituencies based completely in the Valley.