Breakup Bid Gains as Redistricting Move Fades : School board: The onetime high-profile campaign to preserve two all-Valley seats on the seven-member body now finds itself in debt.

Last November, fueled by anger over what they viewed as contempt for San Fernando Valley interests, a group of residents launched an initiative campaign to overturn newly apportioned election districts for the Los Angeles Board of Education.

An alternate map was drawn that would have preserved two all-Valley seats on the seven-member board. Hundreds of petitions were printed. A phone line was set up. Volunteers gathered thousands of signatures to try to qualify the measure for a citywide ballot.

Nine months later, however, the once high-profile campaign is in debt, canvassing is on hold and the entire effort has disappeared from the limelight--a victim of its own anger, which spawned a more visible and more visceral movement to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“The fire in the belly is gone,” said Chatsworth resident Diana Dixon-Davis, one of the faithful who spent several weekends canvassing for the measure. “People saw the redistricting issue as a done deal, and the steam went out and into the breakup.”

Campaign efforts have been ebbing since January, after two heady months of scrambling for signatures to place the remap initiative on the June ballot. Although the Coalition Against Unfair School Elections, or CAUSE, gathered about 50,000 signatures by the end of 1992, the number was well below what was needed to ensure that 48,000 signatures would be validated to qualify the measure.

Leaders of the movement then decided to aim for the June, 1994, ballot, which allowed them to extend the canvassing period by a few months.

But no more signatures were gathered, organizers concede now, and the momentum was lost for a campaign that turned out to be more difficult than its backers had envisioned. The heavy volunteer power needed to collect the requisite number of signatures did not materialize, and the issue was hard for many to grasp, unlike the more emotional movement to break up the school district.

Quite simply, it was difficult explaining that the boundaries of each school board seat had been redrawn through reapportionment, and why it was necessary to redraw them again.

“I found the signature-gathering experience excruciating,” said Dixon-Davis, one of CAUSE’s most active participants. “We thought people would be begging to sign the initiative, but that was not the case.”

The suspended campaign has also piled up a mound of unpaid bills since its launch. Between last September and the end of the year--the only period for which CAUSE filed financial reports--income of about $24,000 was outweighed by expenses of nearly $64,000, according to records kept by the Los Angeles Ethics Commission.

The lion’s share of the group’s income--$20,000--was donated by a Costa Mesa-based company that does business with CAUSE’s political consulting firm. The costs were mostly in the form of printing, consulting fees and postage.

“There is an outstanding debt by CAUSE to a lot of things,” acknowledged Julie Watt of CAUSE’s consulting agency, Stoorza Ziegaus Metzger & Boyer in Los Angeles. “We’re trying to fund-raise. . . . It’s the one active thing we’re doing right now.”

On the campaign front, organizers insist the effort is not dead, though meetings, once held weekly, are now sporadic and sparsely attended. Leaders say the campaign is simply on hold as the group awaits the outcome of state legislation that could lead to a division of the Los Angeles school system.

“It’s sort of in a state of flux,” CAUSE President Cecelia Mansfield said of her coalition. “We’re at a critical decision point about whether or not we want to continue and whether there’s interest in continuing.”

The group is seeking a written opinion from the city attorney’s office in answer to a number of questions. One concern is the fate of the 50,000 signatures already collected. Will the group be able to add to that number or have to start from scratch again?

Among the other courses of action the group is considering is an appeal to the Los Angeles City Council, the composition of which has changed since July, 1992, when the council approved the school board reapportionment plan CAUSE is attempting to overturn. That redistricting plan was designed to concentrate the voting strength of Latinos but eliminated one of two all-Valley seats. Latino activists have promised to bring court action if CAUSE’s efforts succeed.

CAUSE leaders hope Mayor Richard Riordan will also be an ally and have requested a meeting.

But the ongoing saga of district breakup efforts threatens to keep attention diverted from the reapportionment campaign. It has already siphoned away volunteers and supporters, such as Robert L. Scott, the West Hills attorney who was part of CAUSE but ended up devoting most of his energy to splintering L.A. Unified.

Also, the Valley-based 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn., the remap campaign’s strongest backer, has been shifting its sights toward combatting the controversial school voucher initiative, which is due to go before California voters in November.

But Mansfield said her coalition has until the next round of school board elections in April, 1995, to achieve its goals.

“Because of the unlikelihood that anything will be resolved about the breakup issue by the time those elections come around,” she said, “we’re very much interested in continuing to do something about fair representation.”