District Breakup Debated at Hearing : Schools: The issue resurfaces as both sides present familiar arguments before an Assembly subcommittee.

Reviving an issue that struck a controversial and emotional tone in the city just six months ago before fading into the background, state legislators and community activists gathered for a four-hour hearing Tuesday to debate anew the merits of splitting up the troubled Los Angeles school system.

The event--a meeting of an Assembly subcommittee on urban education--was the first move in the run-up to the new legislative session that begins Jan. 3, when breakup supporters vow to resuscitate proposals to divvy up the Los Angeles Unified School District. Last summer, the idea emerged as one of the hottest political issues in the city and in Sacramento, where much of the battle to splinter the system was fought and, ultimately, lost.

Repeating arguments aired constantly during the heyday of the breakup campaign, the movement’s most powerful supporter, state Senate leader David A. Roberti, told half a dozen Assembly members and 50 other attendees that the school district remains a “totally incomprehensible” bureaucratic monolith unable to educate its 640,000 students and unresponsive to parents.

“Who in the world can wend his or her way through this morass, this maze of complication? I can’t,” said the Van Nuys Democrat, whose bill to establish a breakup commission passed the Senate but was rejected by the Assembly Education Committee in September. “The time for palliatives is over--long over.”

“Bureaucracy hinders progress,” added parent Stephanie Carter. “It stifles creativity. It alienates consumers--in this case, parents.”

But in equally familiar rebuttals, opponents contended that carving up the district--the nation’s second largest--would increase segregation and consign inner-city children to inferior schools at a time of heightened racial tension. And merely reducing district size would be no guarantee of a quality education, they said.

“I want you to show me one thing in this bill that would lead to the improvement of education,” Assemblywoman Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles) said to Roberti, who has promised to continue the fight to break up the district even though he will step down from the Senate next year due to term limits.

Tuesday’s informational hearing, chaired by Assemblywoman Juanita M. McDonald (D-Carson), has no direct legislative impact. But breakup advocates hope to sound out objecting lawmakers so that Roberti’s measure can be reworked to be more palatable when it comes up for reconsideration next month.

Though cheered that their issue was back in the spotlight, supporters charged that the hearing--held in South Los Angeles at the California Museum of Science and Industry--was stacked against them and deliberately made inaccessible to residents from the San Fernando Valley, the cradle of the breakup movement.

“These hearings are being held in the middle of a working day,” said Jill Reiss, a Northridge homemaker who is one of the leaders of the breakup drive.

“It eliminates non-working parents”--who must pick up their children from school in the afternoon--”and it eliminates working parents,” she said. “And these are the people we want to encourage to participate.”

Reiss also accused McDonald of being a “puppet” of Willie Brown, the powerful Democratic Speaker of the Assembly whose influence helped doom Roberti’s proposal, and said the list of those who spoke at the hearing did not represent “the public at large.”

The subcommittee also reviewed an unsuccessful proposal by Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) that would ease the requirements for voter-initiated attempts to reorganize school districts.

Currently, the law calls for local school boards to grant approval of any reconfiguration and requires signatures of 25% of the district’s registered voters. Boland’s bill would eliminate the need for approval by the Los Angeles Board of Education and reduce the requisite number of signatures to 10%.

The changes, she said, would make policy-making in Los Angeles more user-friendly and democratic. “I’m sorry to say, present law is neither,” she testified at the hearing.

But Marshall Diaz, chairman of the Latino Redistricting Coalition, said such a measure would unfairly strengthen the power of white voters to direct the destiny of a school system that now serves an overwhelmingly minority student population.

“The majority of the students’ parents are minorities,” he said. “The whites are a minority in this city, and they are trying to create a system where they can still be in control.”