Roberti Unveils Bill on School District Breakup : Education: The proposal will be introduced in the Legislature today and would create a panel to redraw boundaries before voters decide the issue. Speaker Brown strongly opposes the reorganization.

State Sen. President Pro Tem David A. Roberti will introduce legislation in Sacramento today that would allow voters to decide whether to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District by the end of next year.

Roberti announced Monday that his bill would create a 25-member commission, charged with dividing the district into at least seven separate school systems and working out such thorny issues as whether to preserve cross-town busing and what would become of the district’s heralded magnet schools.

The panel would have until July, 1994, to resolve the legal issues and draw boundaries for the new districts--each limited to 100,000 students. The plan would go before voters in the current Los Angeles district in November, 1994.

The proposal has drawn fire from many African-American and Latino community activists, who say it would limit educational options for poor and minority children and lead to racially segregated school districts.

They were joined by a powerful ally Monday when Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) expressed strong opposition to any plan to dismantle the district.

“I oppose breaking up the district. Period,” Brown said. “I don’t want an all-black school district, an all-Latino district or a rich white district.”

Brown, in Los Angeles to preside over his state economic summit beginning today, continued to mediate meetings between top school district and teachers union officials Monday and reported that the sides are “closer than ever” to reaching a contract agreement.

District and union officials fear that a strike threatened for next Tuesday would fuel the breakup movement.

Seeking to blunt criticism that the proposed breakup is racially motivated, Roberti unveiled his legislation at a Monday news conference that included endorsements from several African-American, Latino and Asian-American parents, politicians and businessmen.

“The new districts will be racially diverse for the simple reason that the city itself is far more diverse, far more completely integrated than 20 years ago” when the last attempt to dissolve the district failed, Roberti said Monday.

His legislation calls for the panel overseeing the breakup to include seven parents, one chosen by each school board member; four representatives from teacher and other employee unions in the district; one appointee each from the Los Angeles City Council, the Board of Supervisors, the mayor’s office and cities outside Los Angeles that enroll students in the district. Other panel members would include representatives of the business community, the Parent-Teacher Assn. and the school district’s eight education commissions, which serve as advocates for minority children and those with special needs.

“Their work will have to meet specific criteria that ensure the equal distribution of resources, provide ethnic and socioeconomic diversity and account for special student needs and geographic boundaries,” Roberti said.

The commission will meet weekly, have a paid staff and hold several public hearings, Roberti said. The legislation does not put a price tag on the process, but if it is approved by the Legislature, the cost will be included in next year’s state budget, he said.

But Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills), one of Roberti’s allies in the move to dismantle the district, criticized the panel as too beholden to special interests to develop the kind of radical plan needed to restore power to parents, particularly those in the San Fernando Valley, where support for the breakup is the strongest.

Boland said she plans to introduce separate legislation to give Valley parents and students more seats on the panel and a greater voice in the configuration of the new districts.

Ultimately, she said, some type of compromise legislation stands the best chance of passing the Assembly and Senate, although she and Roberti say they face an uphill battle to win legislative approval.

Roberti said breaking up the 640,000-student district is the only way to restore confidence in a system beset by financial crises, sagging student achievement and bitter labor problems.

As next week’s deadline for the teachers strike approaches, both sides have agreed to meet Wednesday at 8 p.m. with Brown, who said he hopes to reach an agreement then.

Once an agreement is drafted, it must be approved by a majority of the 28,000 members of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

Union and district officials were tight-lipped about the negotiations, refusing to comment after Monday’s meeting. Brown has ordered both sides not to publicly discuss the issue.

Two key issues apparently have consumed the bulk of the negotiations: whether the teachers’ 12% pay cut that prompted the threatened strike can be reduced and what type of assurance the district will give teachers that salaries will not be cut again next year.

Determining the number of district employees appears to have emerged as an important fact in determining whether the pay cut can be reduced. If the number of employees has dropped and is significantly lower than the number the district budgeted for last summer, extra money could be available to reduce the pay cut.

Supt. Sid Thompson and School Board President Leticia Quezada, who are representing the district in the talks, presented a report to Brown on Monday detailing the figures. The number issue has been on the table for weeks. Union leaders have long complained that the district did not provide significant information during negotiations before Brown intervened.

Brown declined to say how the latest numbers compared to the district’s budgeted figure. Instead, he said his staff and union officials will be studying the district figures to determine if the 12% pay cut is justified.

Greatly complicating the talks, Brown said, are controversial “me-too” contract agreements the district reached with non-teacher unions that promise that teachers will not get a better deal than the other unions have. The board imposed similar pay cuts on all employees to help bridge a $400-million budget deficit.

The other unions agreed to the cuts but only on the condition that any more favorable compensation terms given to teachers must be extended to them. The agreements were opposed by the teachers union but are legally binding and cannot be changed.

Brown, who is an attorney, has offered a recommendation for settling another critical union issue--a district guarantee that teacher salaries will not be cut next year. Both sides, however, have not yet signed off on the issue.

“We have come up with the language that specifies what they can guarantee,” Brown said. “The question is whether or not their respective lawyers agree with my interpretation.”