SOUTHEAST AREA : Plan Calls for High Schools to be Paired

When the Los Angeles Unified School District breaks into school clusters next year to tame its bureaucracy, Bell and Huntington Park high schools could be paired as a complex, one of the district’s largest, while South Gate High School may stand alone, according to one proposal by a subcommittee of the Cluster Transition Task Force.

Superintendent Sid Thompson announced in June that to fulfill part of LEARN, the school plan to decentralize decision-making and improve accountability, the district would be restructured and regroup its 650 campuses into up to 32 self-governing “community clusters” of high schools and their feeder campuses. The Cluster Transition Task Force, a group of 10 subcommittees composed of parents, community members and school personnel, has been meeting for weeks to grapple with the reorganization.

The subcommittee assigned to discuss the number and configuration of school clusters has proposed that Bell and Huntington Park high schools create one cluster, committee members said. The subcommittee is expected to vote on the number and makeup of clusters at a meeting 4 p.m. Monday in the district’s business services center, 1425 S. San Pedro St., RBusiness Magnet, 1081 W. Temple St.

The Southeast Legislative Coalition on School Overcrowding had first hoped to unite the three local high schools but realized that with a total of about 56,000 students, the cluster might not receive adequate resources. The coalition then requested that each high school complex be made an independent cluster and lobbied to ensure that none would be paired with an outside school, fearing a conflict of community goals and priorities.

The proposal to pair the two schools makes sense to Tony Garcia, principal of Huntington Park High. “It would work because the population (of the schools) is homogenous,” he said. “It’s mostly Hispanic, we’re on the same (year-round) calendar and the services needed are similar. It’s a good pairing.”

But not everyone is convinced, because it is still unclear how the district’s resources would be distributed.

Willene Cooper, chairwoman of the Southeast Legislative Coalition and a member of the subcommittee, said the Bell-Huntington Park cluster, with more than 37,000 students, could be left shorthanded if, for example, it is assigned the same support personnel as a smaller, suburban high school complex. The subcommittee plan calls for complexes ranging from 4,000 to 40,000 students, Cooper said.

“It’s grossly unjust to make Huntington Park and Bell the second- or third-largest complex in the district,” Cooper said. “Why should we be at the bottom (of the district’s priorities)? We’ve been there forever. If the district is restructuring, we need to move up.” Joyce Peyton, director of the district office of school utilization, said that until the subcommittee votes, anything is possible: “There are so many (elementary and middle) schools in the Bell and Huntington Park complexes that I don’t think the subcommittee will necessarily put them together.”

The subcommittee will submit its recommendations to the schools for approval by parents, teachers and school administrators in early January, and then forward a plan to Thompson in February, said Marianne Hudz, a Reseda parent who is chairwoman of the subcommittee.

“Parents and teachers and members of the community should know that their voice is necessary in signing off on any plan or coming up with any alternates,” Hudz said.

The district plans to implement the cluster proposal by July.