Council Panel Recommends District Breakup : Schools: A City Hall showdown is expected today. The fate of the measure appears to rest with the Valley’s first Latino representative.

A Los Angeles City Council committee voted 2 to 1 Monday to support a proposal in the state Legislature to break up the city’s school district, setting up a showdown in the full council today in which a new member from the San Fernando Valley may hold the deciding vote.

At issue is whether the council will go on record as favoring the breakup motion before it comes up for a crucial vote, expected Wednesday, in the state Assembly Education Committee. Proponents of the breakup hope to get the City Council on record today, hoping that will sway undecided members of the 17-member Assembly committee in Sacramento.

Valley council members Joel Wachs and Laura Chick cast the two votes Monday by which the council’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee recommended to the full council that it support the breakup bill.

The fate of the measure in the full council today appeared to depend on Richard Alarcon--a former aide to Mayor Tom Bradley--who took office less than two weeks ago as the Valley’s first Latino councilman.

Supporters of the breakup bill are counting on Alarcon. Eight votes are needed to pass the endorsement, and proponents figure they have just enough--but only if Alarcon sides with them. During his campaign this spring to represent the heavily Latino northeast Valley, Alarcon said he supported a school district breakup--but never fully embraced the specific measure the council will vote on.

“Alarcon is under heavy pressure,” one City Hall watcher said. “He’s the only minority council member who has been supportive of a breakup, and that’s meant he’s been heavily lobbied by civil rights groups” who oppose the proposal.

Alarcon emerged Monday from a meeting with a delegation of breakup foes saying he has still made no final decision. He said in an interview, however, that he was “tending toward” support for the breakup bill if no better compromise was presented.

Wachs, an early breakup supporter, said the outcome of today’s vote is far from certain. “The pressure is enormous coming from the other side,” Wachs said. “It’s a tough battle and too close to call.”

Wachs, who called for breaking up the district in his unsuccessful campaign for mayor, said breakup foes lobbied even him to soften his position.

“If they’re trying to get me, how much more are they trying to get those less well-identified with the issue,” Wachs said.

In the committee action Monday, Wachs was joined by Chick, newly elected to represent the southwest Valley. They voted to recommend that the full council support the breakup measure, rejecting protests by breakup opponents that the measure is racist.

Chick said she was frustrated by the opponents “stereotyping of the people of the San Fernando Valley” as racists. Support for breakup comes from people “of every race and color--this is not a Valley issue,” Chick said.

Wachs argued that the hardest-hit victims of the existing school system are minority children. “They have suffered the most,” Wachs said. “I don’t see this as divisive and racist.”

Breaking up the school district will clear away bureaucratic deadwood that stands in the way of educational reforms, Wachs argued. He also said breaking up the district could defuse voter anger, thus weakening public support for a school voucher initiative that he said would dismantle the public school system if voters approve it.

The bill’s foes, however, repeatedly contended that the bill would divide the school district into ethnic enclaves and end up damaging educational opportunities for minority students by stranding them in all-minority race districts.

“The vote is white against nonwhite,” contended Herbert Jones, a member of the school district’s Black Education Commission. “There has never been a record of a successful minority-run school district” because racism prevents such districts from obtaining proper funding, Jones said.

“L. A. has a history of racial segregation,” said Councilman Mike Hernandez, the committee member who cast the sole dissenting vote.

Latino activists see the breakup proposal as “a racist attack on the gains we have made in redistricting,” said Marshal Diaz, a major proponent of a plan that was approved last summer by the City Council. The plan created a second school board seat dominated by Latino voters, at the price of eliminating one of the two all-Valley seats on the board.

Also attacking the breakup plan were council members Jackie Goldberg and Mark Ridley-Thomas and school board member Jeff Horton.

Goldberg warned that the consequences of the breakup proposal have not been adequately studied and that the same arguments for breaking up the school district could also be used to justify breaking up the city of Los Angeles.

“Are we starting in motion a movement that says Los Angeles County is too large or that the city is too large?” Goldberg asked.

The breakup bill by state Sen. David Roberti, D-Van Nuys, has already passed the Senate. It would set up a 30-member commission that would draft a plan for breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District into at least seven separate districts. To take effect, however, the commission-adopted plan would have to be approved by voters.