Lomita Revisits Fight for School Autonomy : Education: Fed up with the L.A. Unified District’s centralized board and controversial policies, some citizens are hopeful that their second bid to break away will succeed.

On a recent evening, Lomita parent Cindy Grant slung a satchel over her shoulder, grabbed a pink clipboard, said goodby to the cat and headed out into the cool air to do battle with the giant.

Her weapons were simple: a pen and a petition that asks prospective signers to support her quest and that of a band of parents and city officials. Her goal, however, is ambitious: to break Lomita away from the giant Los Angeles Unified School District.

Six years after their failed effort to form their own school district, Lomitans are at it again. Under the banner of the Committee to Unify Lomita Schools, activists are trying to drum up support for their view that L.A. Unified is a money-squandering, bureaucratic behemoth that is shortchanging their children’s schooling.

“I think it would be nice to have our own school board,” Grant said, strolling past the modest stucco homes in this town that sees itself as an oasis of small-town Americana. “We have our own City Council that we can call on and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on’ with this or that. We get immediate action. We don’t with L.A. (Unified).”

On this evening, in house after house, the voices of frustration with the district of 640,000 students flowed freely. From Todd Nabours, father of a 22-month-old, who just moved to Lomita from Long Beach: “There are too many kids pushed into classrooms. You’re herded in and herded out. When I was in (Banning High) there were 35 kids in some classes.” Nabours vowed not to send his son to Los Angeles schools.

From JoAnn Guthrie, preparing to move to Denver partly so her daughter, a third-grader at Lomita Elementary, won’t have to go to Los Angeles schools: “Now we have the crime and the gang thing and I don’t want her going to junior high here.”

And from Mike Ramirez, father of two children in high school and elementary school, who said the year-round calendar interfered with family schedules: “That fiasco with the year-round calendar blew away a lot of schedules we had for vacations. You get the impression they are stabbing in the dark with too many chiefs.”

The mobilization for the fight is being done Lomita-style. There are the pizza-night fund-raisers at the local Pizza Hut ($60 raised) and the sales of T-shirts featuring a one-room schoolhouse logo and the inscription: “A brighter future for our children” ($600 raised).

In charge, as he was last time, is Robert Hargrave, a city councilman and a 1956 graduate of Narbonne High in Harbor City, the high school that serves Lomita. He sums up the group’s thinking this way: “We want to buy pencils, not condoms.”

It is a catchy slogan that for Lomitans says it all about Los Angeles Unified’s chronic shortage of supplies and, in their minds, the district’s morally corrupt decision to allow high school students access to condoms.

For the committee, a core group of eight organizers with dozens of other active supporters, a school board of Lomitans would ensure that public money is spent where it is needed--in the classroom.

“The district has the entrenchment of those layers of bureaucracy that are driving this system down,” Hargrave said. “The $100,000 lobbyist in Sacramento. The $100,000 assistant superintendents. The levels of bureaucracy with special programs. All of those things cost money and when they take that money, it doesn’t filter down to the teachers who really need it to teach the kids.”

The fight to secede is sure to be tough and long--the committee hopes the new district will open its doors in the fall of 1995.

In 1987, Lomita got to the brink of a secession vote. But the state Board of Education voted 9-1 not to authorize Lomita to hold a binding referendum on seceding from the school district, the last step in the breakaway process.

It was the furthest a school secession movement had advanced since Los Angeles Unified was formed in 1961.

The specter of racial segregation is what killed Lomita’s bid. The state board concluded that allowing the predominantly white students of Lomita to leave would stymie desegregation efforts in the Los Angeles district, since minority students bused to Lomita would have to return to heavily minority schools.

Hargrave predicts the race issue will surface this time around, as it has in the San Fernando Valley, where activists and politicians have been pushing for a breakup of the city school system. He acknowledges that some of those supporting secession in Lomita may have racial motives.

“I think that there are people that are racially motivated in Lomita,” Hargrave said, adding that some people think, “We don’t want those people going to our school.”

“I just feel we have to overcome that,” Hargrave said, noting that Lomita’s minority population, particularly that of Asian-Americans and Latinos, has been growing.

For him and those he knows well, Hargrave said, the issue is strictly local control. Lomita can be provincial, but when it comes to the drive to run its own schools, that may be in its favor, he said.

The thought of throwing off domineering Los Angeles, “big corporate L.A.,” as one resident put it, can be appealing in a town that often disdains anything having to do with its colossal neighbor.

Lomita, residents often say, is nothing like Los Angeles. Most of the houses in Lomita are small with white picket fences. Here and there, American flags fly from front porches even when it’s not a national holiday. Everybody seems to know everybody.

“Lomita is almost like a small Iowa town kind of transplanted into L.A. County,” Hargrave said, adding with a chuckle, “I can’t figure out how it got here.”

Such a small town should have its own school board so, as Grant told many petition signers, “your neighbors will be making all the decisions.”

Secession supporters are still working out the details of their proposal for a Lomita district. Generally, though, they envision a system of about 2,000 students in three neighborhood schools--Lomita Elementary, which is a magnet school; Eshelman Avenue Elementary, and Fleming Junior High School--that the new district would inherit from Los Angeles Unified if the secession went through.

Lomita students at Narbonne High School would go to Fleming, which would become a combined junior and senior high school, according to the Lomita committee’s preliminary plan. Pupils now attending President Avenue Elementary in Harbor City would go to either Lomita or Eshelman Avenue Elementary.

Non-Lomita residents would go to other Los Angeles schools, with transfers into Lomita considered on a case-by-case basis.

Hargrave estimates the operating cost of the new district would be $6 million, with most of the funding derived from state and federal sources. Grants and other subsidies would also be pursued in an effort to avoid instituting a parcel tax, something the committee has promised will not happen.

The committee expects the new district’s curriculum to be as rigorous as any magnet program.

“We will have all the benefits of being a magnet without being a magnet,” said Bob Steinbach, who is on the committee’s feasibility subcommittee.

At last count, about 650 people had signed the petition for a breakaway district. About 3,000 signatures, one quarter of Lomita’s registered voters, are needed for the county school reorganization committee and then the State Board of Education to consider the city’s case.

So far no organized opposition has emerged in Lomita, although Los Angeles Unified objects to any secession move, including one such effort in Carson, where activists have raised similar concerns to Lomita’s.

Daniel Lawson, the Los Angeles Unified administrator in charge of the region that covers Lomita, said he thinks that forming a new district is a bad idea. He said he doubts Lomita could match the diversity of specialized programs that Los Angeles Unified offers, including math, science and language magnet programs.

“The quality of instruction for kids in those three schools would have to be what they are getting now,” Lawson said. “The schools in Lomita are very well-run now. I have concerns that they could do any better.”

So does Warren Furutani, the Los Angeles school board trustee who represents Lomita and the surrounding area. Furutani said he has not made up his mind whether to support Lomita’s secession.

“I know a lot of issues have pushed emotional buttons, the condom issue being one,” Furutani said, “but I would match any of those schools over any in the South Bay.”

Furutani said the key to improving schools and giving local residents a stronger voice is the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) program, which would give neighborhood schools broad latitude in hiring and curriculum decisions. LEARN is expected to be phased in over the next several years.

The committee is skeptical of the promised reforms, or any promises from the district. Its members do not criticize the local principals or teachers, saying they would hire as many as possible depending on enrollment needs.

This fight, they say, comes down to the idea of a town controlling what goes on in its schools, of townsfolk calling the shots. And if mistakes are made, they say, at least they did it--not a cold bureaucracy 20 miles away.

Back on the petition circuit, meanwhile, Cindy Grant ends her night with eight signatures and two rejections for unstated reasons. Several unopened doors will be rapped again on another night. Grant, the mother of three children at Narbonne High and Fleming Junior High, recalled the disappointment of losing the last secession fight, but she is optimistic that things will go better this time.

In 1987, she said, Lomita was on its own, just lowly Lomita versus the giant city school system.

“Last time we did it,” she said, “it was not the accepted thing to do. Now it seems extremely accepted.”

Breaking Away

Here are the steps Lomita must take to form its own school district:

1. Residents submit a petition calling for an independent district to the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Reorganization. The petition must be signed by 25% of Lomita’s registered voters.

2. The county committee studies the proposal, holds hearings on it, prepares a preliminary plan and makes a recommendation regarding its feasibility. The committee determines, for example, whether the new district would be financially viable, whether it would promote racial or ethnic segregation, and what effect it would have on the students’ education. All these findings are forwarded to the State Board of Education.

3. The state board studies the committee’s recommendation, whether for or against. If the board denies the petition, the movement dies; the board cannot be bypassed. If it approves the petition, the proposal goes before voters in territory determined by the board. The question on the ballot asks voters if an independent district should be formed.

4. If voters approve the new district, a school board is then elected. If voters reject the district, advocates interested in continuing the fight would have to start over by gathering signatures for a new petition.

Source: Los Angeles County Office of Education