Schools Unified on One Point: Leaving L.A. : Education: Talk of breaking away from is most serious in Carson, Lomita and Eastview. Two state senators will conduct a hearing on the subject next week.

The way things are going, the Los Angeles Unified School District soon may want to consider renaming itself the Los Angeles Un-tied District.

While activists in the San Fernando Valley plot a breakaway school district, long simmering dissatisfaction with the nation’s second-largest school district has stirred similar ideas of secession in the South Bay, where 100,000 students from five cities attend Los Angeles city schools.

The most serious talk has come from Carson, Lomita and the Eastview section of Rancho Palos Verdes, whose activists plan to address a state Senate public hearing next week in Los Angeles on the breakup of the school system.

Los Angeles Unified in the past has aggressively fought secession movements. School board member Warren Furutani, who represents the South Bay, this week said he believes that school reforms anticipated later this year would be a better answer to district problems than breaking it up.

Many South Bay parents long have been irked by shortages of supplies, including toilet paper and hand towels, the perceived bloated and sprawling bureaucracy, and the looming threat of a teacher strike.

The secessionist movement in the South Bay gained renewed vigor with state Sen. David A. Roberti’s stated vow this month to craft legislation that would make it easier to break up the Los Angeles school system, perhaps into seven or eight districts.

San Fernando Valley activists, upset at a school board redistricting last summer that they contend diluted Valley representation, have pressed for a breakaway Valley district, an idea talked about for years.

Roberti (D-Van Nuys) and state Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara) will conduct a hearing Tuesday in Los Angeles on the issue. Several South Bay parents and city officials plan to attend.

“The kids don’t have pencils to write with,” said Cindy Grant, a Lomita parent with three children in Los Angeles city schools, who wants Lomita officials to pursue a breakup.

“When L.A. Unified is out spending money on condoms, it makes me wonder what in heaven’s name they are doing when they are not supplying kids with basic needs,” Grant said.

“I would not want to say money is being wasted, but I know when the PTA has to go out and spend money for toilet paper, which the Bonita Street Elementary PTA had to do, then I know something is wrong with the system,” said Carson resident Arthur Caracoza, the parent of a first-grader at Bonita and chairman of the Carson Human Relations Commission, which is studying the feasibility of breaking off from the Los Angeles district.

“I have bought pens and pencils and I know a lot of teachers spend their own money,” Caracoza said. But he added that he is not sure a Carson breakaway district would be any better if it encounters the same funding problems as Los Angeles.

Carson will ask its voters in June whether the city should form its own district. And Saturday, the city’s Human Relations Commission meets to appoint a blue ribbon panel of citizens to study the feasibility of breaking from the Los Angeles district. Some 14,000 students go to six schools in the city. Other Carson students attend an elementary school in the troubled Compton Unified School District, and Carson officials want to break from it as well.

The issue is moving forward in other ways in the South Bay.

The Eastview neighborhood in Rancho Palos Verdes continues its efforts to secede from the Los Angeles district and join the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District. Eastview parents are seeking another election on the issue after a Superior Court judge nullified the previous one on grounds that not enough people with a stake in the issue were permitted to vote.

About 750 Eastview students attend six schools in the Los Angeles district. The Eastview secessionists also are planning to appeal the Superior Court ruling.

And the city of Lomita, which unsuccessfully tried to break away several years ago, is now taking another look at the issue. The City Council has scheduled a public discussion of the issue at its regular meeting Monday night. More than 2,000 students attend three Los Angeles district schools in Lomita.

Moreover, in a sign of increasing interest in the issue from Sacramento, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown this week appointed Assemblywoman Juanita McDonald (D-Carson) as chairwoman of the Subcommittee for Urban Quality Education. McDonald said the new subcommittee will analyze the condition of education in the state’s urban districts, making Los Angeles a top priority in light of the growing movement to break up the district.

McDonald, a former Carson City Council member and Los Angeles school district administrator, said she has cautioned Carson officials about trying to break away from the school system because of unanswered questions about how a new district would be funded. The problem is more confounding for Carson because, unlike other cities, it does not have a property tax, which theoretically could help provide a new district with steady income.

“We are now in such critical financial hot water that the thought of breaking off and forming anything that might call for astronomical money is a bit shortsighted,” McDonald said.

Indeed, those who wish to break from Los Angeles Unified have yet to answer fundamental questions of funding and the placement of students who are bused in or out of independent cities.

Typically, a city that forms its own school district inherits the buildings and students within its city limits and is entitled to state funding, although it is uncertain how much money needs to be generated locally.

Cities that want to secede need the approval of 25% of the registered voters and approval from the county office of education. Any appeals are heard by the State Board of Education.

Still more vexing is how new districts could be created without upsetting the racial balance in Los Angeles Unified, an issue that the school system has used successfully over the years to thwart secession drives.

That issue scuttled Lomita’s drive five years ago, with the State Board of Education voting 9-1 to reject Lomita’s plan to break away. Lomita, along with Eastview, is predominantly white.

Opponents argue that allowing predominantly white areas to pull out would leave the Los Angeles district more heavily black and Latino, leading to multiple school districts largely segregated along racial lines.

Carson, whose population is roughly evenly divided among African-Americans, Anglos, Asians, and Latinos, may be able to quell that argument because its pullout would not drastically change the racial makeup of the district.

Marvin Clayton, president of the Carson-Torrance branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said at first glance the idea of a Carson district looks good, but the branch is continuing to study the issue.

“We want to make sure a Carson unified district is going to benefit all of the citizens of Carson,” Clayton said.

In any case, Sen. Roberti has acknowledged that the breakup of Los Angeles Unified would be several years away and quite complicated.

Furutani, the Los Angeles school board member who represents the South Bay, agreed, saying the wisest route to solving the district’s problems goes through the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, a 2-year-old private study group of educators better known as LEARN.

The LEARN plan, which will be presented formally to the school board in a couple of weeks, calls for decentralizing the district so that school-based councils of teachers and parents would have a greater voice in hiring and curriculum decisions.

“My position clearly is in support of the LEARN recommendations,” said Furutani, who added that he has not closed his mind to a breakup. “I just don’t know if the local communities are going to be able to generate the money needed to run the schools. I am not completely closed to a breakup. But I think the LEARN task force recommendations are the key.”

Critics of the Los Angeles district, however, are skeptical about whether the district will adopt the recommendations because of years of unfulfilled promises of reform.

Decentralizing, moreover, may not go far enough in addressing another issue: the perception that future community unity is best fostered through home rule of the schools.

“We are really caught between a rock and a hard place because we are in Los Angeles schools but we are not in Los Angeles,” said Kari Tapie, a parent and leader of Residents for Unified Local Education (RULE), which is trying to withdraw Eastview from the Los Angeles district into the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District. The effort has been under way since Rancho Palos Verdes annexed the community, formerly unincorporated Los Angeles County territory, in 1983.

“We are part of the community in every other way,” Tapie said. “My kids have friends who say ‘You don’t really live in P.V. because you don’t go to P.V. schools.’ That’s a tough one to handle.”

“Because of the size of the district it does not see little Lomita as a very complex problem,” said Lomita Councilman Robert Hargrave, who lead the two-year secession fight. “A lot of people feel disenfranchised.”

He, for one, said he is not up for another fight.

“It’s a political decision and there would have to be a state legislative bill,” Hargrave said. “Maybe we have to go hat in hand to the state Legislature.”

Secession Movement Dissatisfied with the Los Angeles Unified school system, a number of South Bay communities are seeking to withdraw from the giant district. So far, Carson, Lomita and the Eastview area of Palos Verdes Peninsula have taken up the issue.