2 of Valley Business Group’s Panels Support School District Breakup

Two committees of a major San Fernando Valley business organization Thursday threw their weight behind a move that could break up the Los Angeles school district.

They recommended that the group oppose the school voucher initiative, however.

The education and state issues committees of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. recommended that VICA--made up of about 350 firms with about 250,000 employees--support a bill introduced in the state Legislature by state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys). The bill calls for the appointment of a commission to produce a plan for splitting the Los Angeles Unified School District into at least seven smaller districts.

The VICA committees took action after concluding that the district’s bureaucracy is too bloated for parents to have any meaningful impact on their children’s education.

“It’s unmanageable,” Sandra Klasky, VICA education committee co-chair, said of the current Los Angeles school system, the nation’s second largest. “The feeling was that it has developed too many layers of bureaucracy, that it is unmanageable, unreachable and inaccessible to parents.”

What is needed, she said, is “an empowering of parents to feel like they in some way can relate to the people who are running the district, as well as their particular school.”

Roberti’s bill--under which voters would have the final say on a breakup--has cleared the Senate floor and is in the Assembly, where Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) has vowed to fight it. Brown and other opponents contend that cutting up the district would bring on segregation, with minority children relegated to second-rate schools in inner-city areas.

Also Thursday, the two VICA committees jointly voted to oppose the school choice initiative that would create state-funded vouchers, which parents could use to send their children to private, public or parochial schools. If approved, the sweeping initiative, which will go before state voters in November, could fundamentally change public education in California.

“Nobody denies that we need change,” Klasky said. However, her committee opposes “the diminishing of state money to give to private schools,” she said.

Private and parochial institutions also are not required to serve disabled students and other children with special needs, as public schools must do, Klasky added.

But Sean Walsh, a spokesman for the group sponsoring the initiative, rejected those arguments, saying the measure would actually save money since each voucher would only be worth half the amount the state spends per pupil in its public schools. The initiative would also free groups such as those that work with the disabled to set up schools specifically catering to the needs of those children, he said.

Walsh said his group would send a representative to VICA’s July 19 meeting, when the board of directors will decide whether to ratify the two committee recommendations made Thursday, to make the case in favor of the voucher initiative.