Speakers Urge Initiatives to Give Schools Local Control : Education: Forum brings together reformers who want decisions made on campus, but panelists say austere state budgets will be a hurdle to change.

More than a third of Los Angeles schools are involved in some kind of educational restructuring, and reformers at a Saturday symposium in Woodland Hills called for accelerating the movement toward local control to harness the energies of parents and staff and improve the learning process.

Local-control initiatives embraced by a growing number of schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are helping the campuses to “take control over their destiny,” and will transform the behemoth district from a “command and control kind of structure to a service organization,” said Robert Wycoff, president of LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now).

The idea is to put “the decision making and the budget authority where the kids are,” Wycoff said.

About 125 people at a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles heard Wycoff and other panelists describe the structure and goals of several school reform programs aimed at improving student achievement in the district’s 624 schools.

But while voicing high hopes for the reform movement, panelists acknowledged the barriers to success in a state that in 15 years has plummeted from the top to near the bottom in per-pupil spending.

“Overall, the whole reform effort requires a dollar amount, and it’s just not happening,” said Joe Rao, the district’s coordinator of reform initiatives.

Despite a confusing array of titles and acronyms, the restructuring programs all aim to increase authority of school principals, teachers and parents over curriculum, staffing and budgets. The initiatives--some launched for the first time this semester--differ mainly in the degree of freedom they provide from state education and school district controls.

Among the most important are “school-based management,” in place at 92 schools; LEARN, expected to spread rapidly from the current 34 campuses, and the charter schools, of which there are 10.

In explaining the autonomy of the charter schools, Peggy Funkhouser, president of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a reform group, told of a recent conversation with Yvonne Chan, principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in San Fernando--a charter school that until recently was called the Vaughn Street Elementary School.

“I got a call one day from Yvonne, asking for an investment counselor for her (school’s) monies. Now, that’s different,” Funkhouser said.

According to Rao, the recent shift away from the district’s “one size fits all” approach has been accompanied by a “tremendous downsizing--or right-sizing, we like to say--of the downtown offices.”

Although panelists said austere state budgets for public education are a barrier to reform, Wycoff said the public is “willing to give more money if the system improves itself.”

“We have to demonstrate that this is a new day, and we are going to reform our schools,” Wycoff said.

The League of Women Voters sponsored the forum as part of a research project on school restructuring alternatives. The league, which plans to become more involved in the school reform debate, will take stands based on the study, said Estelle Lit of Northridge, co-chairwoman of the league’s education committee.

School board member Julie Korenstein, who served as moderator, later said the forum was “invigorating,” and brought together for the first time “all the different reform movements in the district.”

Happily, said Korenstein, “we all seem to be going in the same direction--which is to shore up public education and . . . make public education shine.”