School Breakup Plans Revive in Legislature : Education: GOP surge along with bills from Boland, Hayden brighten prospects for carving up giant LAUSD.

At first blush, it might seem futile these days to revive legislation that would dismantle the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District.

Agitation at the grass-roots level, which made the breakup the hot-button topic of 1993, has virtually vanished. Local politicians, quick to seize on the issue in campaigns and sound bites, have turned their attention to other concerns.

The breakup’s biggest champion, former state Senate leader David A. Roberti, no longer holds elected office, while its most powerful foe, Willie Brown, still presides over the Assembly.

But paradoxically, prospects for new legislation to help carve up the nation’s second-largest school system may be brighter than ever, thanks in great part to the Republican surge in the state Capitol last November.

GOP Assembly members now match Democrats in number--and may take the lead after special elections in coming months. Republican nemesis Brown (D-San Francisco) has seen his influence as Speaker considerably reduced under a new power-sharing plan.

Breakup advocates--including at least one Democrat--have won appointment to the key Assembly Education Committee, which killed breakup legislation at Brown’s direction two years ago on a partisan vote. And if a new bill by Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) can reach the Assembly floor, influential Democrats may split from the Speaker, like longtime ally Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

“We’ve broken ranks before,” said Katz, who supports the effort to divvy up the district. “Chances (for a breakup proposal) are good this year because it’s a different Legislature.”

In a twist, the Senate--which overwhelmingly passed a breakup measure by Roberti in the last session--may present the greater challenge this time without the former president pro tem to shepherd legislation through. But Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), an Education Committee member with impeccable liberal credentials, has picked up where Roberti left off.

Although the heady days of daily news conferences and rowdy community forums are over, many Los Angeles residents remain frustrated with the pace of school reform and believe smaller districts would serve them better. At least one Board of Education member, President Mark Slavkin, is less hostile to the latest wave of legislation to ease the breakup process than the board as a whole has been in the past.

“I’m really optimistic for this session,” said Boland, author of one of two bills pending before lawmakers.

Her proposal seeks to vastly reduce the signature requirement for a petition to secede from the system--from 25% of all registered voters in the district to 8% of those who voted in the district in the last gubernatorial election.

Boland’s measure will likely be packaged with a bill by Hayden that specifies the creation of at least seven new districts and protects programs dealing with integration, spending and campus autonomy.

Both Boland and Hayden, who have joined forces despite their political differences, insist that their bills do not automatically break up the 640,000-student Los Angeles school system. Instead, they say, their legislation would merely remove obstacles that make it difficult for voters to organize their schools as they see fit.

To Slavkin, the distinction is clear between these two measures and Roberti’s failed bill, which would have named a commission to draft a plan for carving up the district.

At the time, Slavkin opposed Roberti’s proposal, saying he did not object to a breakup in theory but preferred a more far-reaching plan to devolve authority to individual campuses.

Slavkin, who met with Hayden recently to discuss the breakup issue, called Hayden’s bill “a thoughtful approach” and added that Boland’s proposal also offers a workable starting point. He predicted that the school board, due to take a position on the two proposals soon, may “not see these bills the same as it did the Roberti bill.”

A moderated position by the board would mark a major departure from two years ago, when most board members lobbied vigorously against a breakup.

However, some of Slavkin’s colleagues remain adamantly opposed to any division of the 708-square-mile system. Also against it is the politically influential teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles, which is gearing up for another fight.

“I’ve asked the question over and over: My daughter teaches first grade in the San Fernando Valley. Tell me what the school district (breakup) is going to do for her in her classroom and her children?” said Bill Lambert, director of governmental relations for UTLA.

“Is she going to have more money for materials? Will it reduce her class size?”

But even Lambert acknowledges that the changed political environment in Sacramento has given Boland and Hayden’s legislation a better shot than in 1993.

In the Assembly, the loss of Democratic ascendancy forced Brown, one of the most powerful Speakers in the chamber’s history, to give up the ability to stack committees in favor of his party. Under the new rules, each panel hosts an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.

In the crucial Education Committee, “all the Republicans . . . are probably going to be in favor of breaking up the school district,” and possibly some Democrats from rural areas, said committee Chairwoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado). She said she herself remains undecided on the issue.

If the GOP panel members unanimously support Boland’s measure, then only one Democratic vote would be needed to push the bill out of committee, where Brown used his power in the last session to strike down the Roberti proposal.

That swing vote could belong to Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman (D-North Hollywood), who has publicly pledged support for the breakup drive.

“It’s so divisive, and I wish there was a way it could be handled differently,” Friedman said of the breakup campaign, which often pitted San Fernando Valley residents against those in other parts of the city.

But “I think it’s in everyone’s best interests, regardless of which side of the hill you’re on.”

It is the Senate that could prove a more difficult obstacle without Roberti’s presence and pressure.

At Roberti’s prodding, the upper house passed his bill easily by a 28-7 margin in June, 1993.

Now, the Education Committee, the Hayden bill’s first stop, may be less friendly. Three members who supported breakup legislation in the past are matched by three who opposed it. The other three members, two Democrats and one Republican, are new to the Senate and will break the stalemate.

“The committee’s not as good, but not insurmountable. I look for it to be nip and tuck, but I expect for it to clear the Senate,” said Roberti, who now serves on the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.

Hayden said his bill, without the commission envisioned by Roberti’s proposal, should not trouble anyone who voted for the previous measure.

“In theory, you don’t have to be for or against a breakup of the district to be for the two bills,” he said. Boland’s bill is “kind of a right-to-vote bill. The second bill gives some assurance that existing court cases and reform arrangements like LEARN are maintained in any future devolution of the district, and I don’t know who could oppose that.”

One foe is Mike Roos, the former assemblyman who heads the vaunted LEARN decentralization effort.

“It’s such a huge distraction from what we think to be the right direction,” Roos said. “Breaking up the district is nothing more than a code word for a neighborhood trying to get their hands around the learning plan of the schools their kids attend.”

That desire for local control is better served by LEARN and other reforms, such as legislation that would channel most state education funds directly to schools rather than their district offices, Roos said.

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