McKeon Lauds Proposed Breakup of L.A. District : Schools: The lawmaker tells a parent-teacher group the move would be a victory for local control.

Calling himself a longtime supporter of the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon told San Fernando Valley PTSA leaders Friday that reorganization would be a victory for local control of schools.

In addressing the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn. Legislative Conference in Van Nuys, the freshman Republican representative from Santa Clarita likened the proposed breakup to his hometown’s incorporation five years ago.

“When we broke away from the county, it gave the people control over what goes on,” said McKeon, who was Santa Clarita’s first mayor before running for Congress last year. “This is the same thing you could achieve if you had your own districts.

“It doesn’t solve your problems, but it gives you a chance to solve your problems,” said McKeon, who began his political career as a board member of the William S. Hart Union High School District.

Although most of McKeon’s district lies in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, one-third of it encompasses areas served by the Los Angeles school system, including Chatsworth, Northridge, North Hills, Mission Hills and Granada Hills.

A bill to break up the sprawling Los Angeles district is now being considered in the state Senate.

McKeon said he supported the breakup of Los Angeles Unified in 1979 when he initially ran for the school board seat on a campaign of preventing Santa Clarita students from being bused to Los Angeles schools.

It wasn’t until after the campaign, he said, that he learned that students from one district could not be forced to attend schools in another district.

Last month, McKeon joined the movement to split up the mammoth L.A. district and requested help from U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno in determining guidelines to follow to comply with federal civil rights laws in the breakup.

Opponents of the breakup allege that the reorganization proposal has segregationist motives, with the mostly Anglo San Fernando Valley wanting to break away from the rest of the city with its large ethnic-minority population.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) also addressed the group, which has not taken an official stand on the proposed breakup but whose individual members clearly favor it. He told them not “to get your hopes up that this will be resolved in less than five years.”

Hayden predicted that the bill to break up the 640,000-student district, which cleared the Senate Education Committee earlier this week, would pass the Senate but would either get bogged down or unacceptably diluted in the Assembly.

“The probability is that after all of this bickering and argument, we will be paralyzed and in gridlock,” Hayden said.