Group Mounts Campaign to Fight Breakup

In a response to efforts to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District, a group of mainly Latino parents met Saturday to voice their opposition to the plan and to organize their own anti-breakup campaign.

“The message here today is not all parents support the breakup,” organizer Marshall Diaz said during a news conference. “Not all parents will support a proposal that doesn’t clearly define how it will help students.”

Organizers said about 250 people representing 35 schools throughout the city attended the event at Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley.

Although most were Latino, the activists included an Anglo mother from Van Nuys, a representative from the district’s Asian/Pacific Education Commission and several African-American parents.

Most attending Saturday were members of Parents for Unity, a districtwide grass-roots organization, and all expressed concern that a breakup would resegregate the multiracial school system and leave minority children--who comprise 87% of the district’s enrollment--with even fewer resources than they have now.

“Blacks and browns can come together for our own children,” Gloria Westfield, a Figueroa Elementary School parent, declared to hearty applause.

The meeting was scheduled largely to counter an Aug. 7 “parents summit” held by breakup proponents who say the 640,000-student school system has become too big, and its bureaucracy too unwieldy, to be effective.

The pro-breakup meeting at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys drew mostly white parents and was attended by several elected officials, including Mayor Richard Riordan, City Council members Laura Chick, Hal Bernson and Joel Wachs, state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) and state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), a leader of the movement.

Those and other San Fernando Valley heavyweights were absent from Saturday’s event. But school board members Leticia Quezada and Victoria Castro came to express their own opposition to a district breakup.

They also urged parents to vote against Proposition 174, the state initiative on the November ballot that would entitle students to tax-supported, $2,600 vouchers toward private- or parochial-school tuition.

“This is a separate and unequal education system,” Castro said of the voucher initiative, which would change the way the state funds education.

Some breakup proponents have viewed Proposition 174, whether it wins or loses, as a potential political boon that could make their own proposal seem less drastic and a more palatable alternative.

The West Valley-based campaign to replace the giant school district with several smaller ones stalled last summer when a Roberti-sponsored bill, which would have created a commission to devise a breakup plan, was defeated in the Assembly. Roberti, however, says the effort is far from dead. On Friday, he met with other breakup proponents in Encino to devise a strategy to advance proposals to dismantle the school system.

Leaders of Saturday’s meeting said they viewed both the voucher initiative and proposed breakup as attempts by Anglo politicians and their voters to abandon public education at the expense of minority students.

“We’ve worked too hard and too long to let any pencil-pushing politicians break up our district,” South Los Angeles resident Princess Sykes told the cheering crowd.

“We are the parents of the ‘90s.”