Roberti May Form Panel to Split Schools : Education: The lawmaker is considering a plan to create a 25-member commission that could divide the district into several jurisdictions.

Senate President Pro-Tem David A. Roberti told a private gathering of lawmakers Thursday that he is considering legislation to create a 25-member commission that would be charged with carving up the mammoth Los Angeles school district into at least seven jurisdictions, each with no more than 100,000 students.

The specially appointed panel would work out the “nitty-gritty” details of dismantling the nation’s second-largest school district, but Roberti’s plan would give Los Angeles voters the ultimate say on whether to go ahead with the breakup, said lawmakers who attended the meeting in Sacramento.

“Whatever the decision, it would come to a vote of the people,” said state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), one of 15 Los Angeles-area lawmakers who attended the early morning session.

Roberti’s discussion with Rosenthal and the other legislators offered the first glimpse of how the powerful Van Nuys Democrat may pursue his newly embraced goal of dismantling the district, a politically sensitive proposition that he says will make the school system more responsive to parents and help preserve public education.

He must introduce the legislation by March 5, the deadline for submitting new bills.

Roberti began pushing the idea after legislative reapportionment forced him to run for reelection in a new district in the San Fernando Valley, where residents have advocated spinning off their own school system for nearly 20 years.

Some school officials and minority groups, however, vehemently oppose the breakup plan. They say it is a holdover from the antibusing wars of the 1970s, is motivated by racial and class differences, and would establish a series of segregated districts that would put Latino, African-American and other minority students at a disadvantage.

On Thursday, school board President Leticia Quezada said she will fight any plan by Roberti to splinter the district. “We expect to be engaged in a very bitter battle with David Roberti to prevent whatever his plan is from becoming law,” she said.

“I think it is a very destructive movement, no matter who does it,” she added. “It is very ill-timed when we are struggling with so many crises on our plate at the same time. These efforts are counterproductive.”

The district has faced budget problems for the past several years, including a $400-million deficit this year. The teachers union has threatened to strike on Feb 23, mainly over a 12% pay cut this year.

According to Rosenthal and two other lawmakers at Thursday’s meeting--Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley)--Roberti outlined his plan in broad terms. They said he would favor retaining some centralized services, such as purchasing, for the new school jurisdictions.

But the current seven-member school board would be disbanded and the 650,000-student district separated into entities of “not more than 100,000” pupils. Although Roberti did not name a specific number of districts, the 100,000 limit would mean at least seven new districts, they said.

Roberti’s plan would create a 25-member commission to work out the details of the breakup, the lawmakers said.

“He was talking about a cross section of the representation in the city itself--that is Asians, the blacks, the Latinos and specifically concerned groups such as the business community, the unions,” said Rosenthal. “It is a broad cross section.”

Steve Glazer, a spokesman for Roberti, also said the commission would perform its job under “specific criteria that maintain equal funding and demographic diversity” among the new districts. He did not elaborate, however, on how that would be achieved.

Glazer stressed that the proposed legislation is among a “variety of options” that Roberti is considering and that details could change as the senator receives comments from the community. Among the new information Roberti might consider could be a proposal by the state Department of Education made during a Senate hearing Tuesday to splinter the district into about 30 entities of 15,000 to 25,000 students each.

Polanco predicted that whatever the form, Roberti faces an uphill battle in the Legislature.