Activists Oppose Breakup of L.A. Schools : Education: Coalition says an effort to dismantle the district is racially divisive and will harm minority students.

An influential coalition of civil rights advocates, black and Latino activists and politicians vowed Monday to fight what they view as a racially divisive campaign to break up the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District.

About 45 people, including clergy, educators and parents, gathered on the steps of City Hall and decried the effort led by state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) to dismantle the nation’s second-largest school district as a racially motivated move that would lead to segregation and unequal education for the city’s youth.

leaders of the predominantly black and Latino group said the breakup campaign, which has its support base in the San Fernando Valley, will only serve to aggravate racial tensions in the riot-scarred city.

“Without a doubt this is not the time to add anything else to this pot that is boiling that even smacks of divisiveness and separating the city along ethnic and geographic lines,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, a former school board member who called together the coalition.

“When we talk about separation, we are not talking about education,” said Councilman Mike Hernandez. “I am going to fight to make sure we remain one city, one district.”

Anti-breakup activists contend that black and Latino children in the inner city and heavily overcrowded schools in cities southeast of Los Angeles will be hurt by a breakup. More than 28,500 children are bused to schools, primarily in the Valley and the Westside, because their neighborhood schools are overcrowded.

“We know the whole plan is to Balkanize L.A. and we will not tolerate it anymore,” said school board member Barbara Boudreaux, who represents South Los Angeles.

Also, several Latino leaders said they will not allow a district breakup to negate their hard-fought battle last summer to create a school district seat that encompasses northeast and southeast Los Angeles, where 48% of the registered voters are Latino.

The breakup movement is not a new one. Prompted by discontent over public education and what they perceive to be the Valley’s inferior political standing in the district, a group of business people, parents and educators have long advocated a separate Valley school system. They recently received a powerful endorsement from Roberti.

The Senate president pro tem, who was elected to a Valley seat last year, has said he will introduce legislation next month to break up the district and will work during his remaining two years in office to make it a reality.

Acknowledging that the breakup process may take years, Roberti recently said he will consider breaking the system into as many as seven or eight smaller districts.

He said integration and school funding remain important issues as he hammers out legislation but the sheer size of the district precludes efficient stewardship and discourages parental involvement in policy-setting.

“I stand by my decision. Education is our mutual concern. That is my goal,” he said.

“You have to expect name-calling any time you try to do something that upsets the status quo,” he added in response to suggestions of racism.

Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, who last week called upon his colleagues to support the idea of a breakup, denied that it would unfairly penalize minority and inner-city children. “It’s exactly the opposite,” said Wachs. “The present system has failed, and the people being hurt the most are the minorities.”

While saying that he has not yet taken a position on the breakup issue, Gov. Pete Wilson said Monday through a spokeswoman that “I recognize that there must be serious administrative problems associated with overseeing such a large and diverse district.”

African-American, Latino and Asian children together make up 87% of the system’s 640,000 students. About 13% of students districtwide are Anglo.

If the Valley were its own district and if current busing patterns remained, the Anglo student population in the Valley would be about 27%. The Anglo population in schools outside the Valley would be 7%, according to a Times analysis of district statistics.

Joseph H. Duff, president of the Los Angeles office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said Monday his group would strenuously fight splitting up the district and draw upon the legal resources of the national organization to ward off a breakup.

Duff, an attorney who helped press the historic Crawford desegregation lawsuit that triggered mandatory busing in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, contended that provisions in the state Constitution prohibiting racial separation would doom a breakup.

Duff and others emphasized that opposing the breakup does not mean that they are endorsing the current management policies of the embattled district, torn by threats of a teachers strike next month and reeling under an unprecedented $400 million in budget cuts this year.

“Being here today does not mean that we are saying that the district is doing everything perfectly or that there does not need to be radical . . . reform measures taken,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “However it seems there is an attempt to racially orchestrate the breakup of the district to rid themselves of what is perceived to be inner-city problems.”