5-Year Plan to Overhaul L.A. Schools Is Outlined : Education: Proposal by LEARN would phase in $60 million in reforms, such as giving teachers more power and training. Supporters say it is a better approach than using vouchers or splitting the district.

Trying to stave off a growing movement to split up the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District, the leaders of an education reform campaign urged the school board Monday to accept their plan--which would cost $3.3 million to launch--as the best way to overhaul the beleaguered district and improve its public standing.

“We know there are no silver bullets, no quick-fix solutions. LEARN has always rejected as illusory the proposed panaceas of vouchers and breaking up the school district,” said Mike Roos, president of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now.

“We believe that school improvement must be allowed to take place at the local school level, within a districtwide framework.”

The LEARN plan calls for reforms at all 650 campuses in the district within five years, with a total price tag of more than $60 million--a substantial burden for a district that has raised class sizes, cut employee pay and scrapped all but the most essential services in absorbing $1 billion in budget cuts over four years.

Two hundred LEARN supporters packed the school board hearing room Monday as Roos formally unveiled the group’s package of reforms to improve student performance. The board will hold a series of community meetings to explain the plan over the next month.

Supt. Sid Thompson expressed strong support Monday for the reforms, which are likely to be approved by the board when it votes in March. “This superintendent intends to not just cooperate but fully implement every aspect of this plan,” he said before Roos began his pitch.

The estimated $3.3 million to start the program this fall covers 30 schools. Roos, pledged to raise the amount from private foundations.

“If we fail--and I don’t think we will--we would ask the district (for funds),” Roos said. “But we plan on succeeding. My own belief is (that) this is a small price to pay for reorienting this district and bringing together parents, teachers, administrators . . . all with one aim: to help children learn better.”

After studying reform efforts nationwide for two years, LEARN’s 600 trustees developed a seven-part plan aimed at improving student performance. It calls for transferring more power to teachers and principals, and, in return, holding them accountable for student achievement. The plan also suggests giving parents more say over which schools their children attend, urges on-campus social services and backs better training for new and veteran teachers.

The bulk of the start-up costs--about $2 million--would go to train teachers, principals and parents in fostering a so-called culture of innovation that focuses on learning. Because school principals would have total authority over campus budgets--including buying cafeteria food and making playground repairs--they would receive additional training in financial operations.

The initial costs include $1 million the first year to hire coordinators for three groups of schools that would pilot the program and to beef up the counseling staffs in each school complex. The group proposes spending $200,000 to develop better ways to measure student achievement than the standardized tests currently in use.

The start-up budget was developed by a UCLA team headed by Theodore Mitchell, dean of the university’s Graduate School of Education. Members estimated the costs over three years based on beginning the reforms at three high school complexes (a complex is a high school and the junior high and elementary campuses that feed into it). The initial plan would be implemented in the 1993-94 school year.

The second year of the pilot effort is estimated to cost $2.5 million and the third year $2 million.

If the start-up plan succeeds, LEARN supporters hope much of the cost will be borne by foundations interested in applying the lessons of the the district’s experiments in school reform, as well as by businesses that have a stake in generating a better-educated work force. But the plan faces many obstacles, including the district’s precarious financial condition, deepening animosities between teachers and administrators--which may lead to a teacher strike this month--and mounting pressure from area lawmakers to break the district into smaller units.

Even mayoral candidate and LEARN trustee Richard Riordan has said he favors breaking up the district.

The formal presentation of the plan comes as a powerful political force, Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), is mounting an aggressive campaign to break up the 640,000-student system. Roberti has said he will soon introduce legislation to form a 25-member panel to carve the system into at least seven districts of no more than 100,000 students.

A slim majority of the seven-member school board--Leticia Quezada, Barbara Boudreaux, Jeff Horton and Warren Furutani--are opposed to Roberti’s proposal, in large part because they have embraced the LEARN plan.

“For me, the approach is talking about LEARN. It deals with local control. It deals with the education of kids,” said Furutani, who is running for the 15th District City Council seat held by Joan Milke Flores. “My problem with the breakup is that it is all political. It is all about how many districts we should have, and no one is talking about how better to provide the services.”

School board members Roberta Weintraub and Julie Korenstein support breaking up the district, calling it ungovernable and unresponsive to community needs. Weintraub favors a multi-district breakup, whereas Korenstein supports a San Fernando Valley succession. But Korenstein said other communities should also have the opportunity to form a separate system.

Board member Mark Slavkin expressed strong support for the LEARN concepts, calling them “a step toward uniting this community.” But he said he wants the plan to be put into action more quickly, because that phasing it in over a number of years could be “too little, too late.”

He has drawn up his own “radical decentralization plan” that calls for abolishing the existing school board and adopting LEARN’s restructuring concepts. He would form semiautonomous clusters of schools--based on high school attendance areas--in which principals, teachers and parents would have decision-making authority. Some operations, such as cafeteria service, payroll and transportation, would be handled by a central agency.