SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : Breaking Away : Calling for control of education in their communities, residents seek to split from huge L.A. school district.

The toilet paper incident was not the reason Carson parent Gayle Konig pulled her children from the Los Angeles Unified School District. But it certainly played a role.

Her children’s school had run out of toilet paper, and the principal told her the new stock wouldn’t arrive for two weeks. Incensed at the thought of her children going without, Konig tried to reach the district administrator.

After several of her calls went unanswered, she called someone in supplies, who had new toilet paper in the stalls the very next day. When the district administrator finally got back to her, she was shocked to learn he didn’t even know the name or the phone number of the employee who had taken care of the problem.

“I was absolutely livid,” Konig said. “I said, ‘Why don’t you call up and introduce yourself?’ It showed me the district is one big bureaucratic mess.”

Konig’s children now attend school in Torrance, where she works as a law clerk. But she is still doing battle with Los Angeles Unified. She serves as vice chairwoman of a committee that is trying to win Carson the right to form its own school district.

“We want to control the destiny of our own children’s education,” Konig said. “And we feel we know what our children need better than anybody else.”

The frustrations that drove Konig to want to break away from Los Angeles Unified have been rippling through the district for 20 years. But those ripples have crested into waves in three South Bay communities that are seeking independence from the giant district.

The cities of Carson and Lomita are trying to form their own school districts, and the Eastview community of Rancho Palos Verdes wants to send its children to the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District.

Parents in those communities say they believe Los Angeles Unified is too big, its governing board too far away and its administrators too numerous to allow the district to respond adequately to their concerns. Student achievement would improve and property values would increase, they believe, if they were allowed to break away from the district.

The road to independence is no straight shot.

Communities that want to split from Los Angeles Unified must petition the County Committee on School District Organization for the right to form a new district. That committee conducts hearings throughout the district and makes recommendations to the state Board of Education.

If the state board approves, it sets an election in territory that includes the proposed district. And even if voters back the bid to form a separate district, Los Angeles Unified has the power to veto the move.

The process is lengthy and difficult. Among the most important criteria petitioners must now meet is proving that the reorganization will not promote racial segregation. The last city to secede from Los Angeles Unified and form its own district was Torrance in the late 1940s. In recent years, two communities have won the right to educate their children in neighboring school districts. Fox Hills now sends its children to schools in Culver City. And a community east of Las Virgenes educates its students in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

South Bay parents tick off one example after another to illustrate why they want to leave the Los Angeles district.

Many complain about the district’s decision after last year’s earthquake to close all of its schools for five days--even in communities that sustained no damage.

“There was no local decision,” said Bob Hargrave, a leading voice in Lomita’s independence movement. “But when the monolith moves, everyone takes the brunt of it.”

He and others say parents shouldn’t have to drive 30 miles to Downtown Los Angeles to attend school board meetings. They believe their children’s schools would function better if the district’s policy-makers lived in the community.

But Los Angeles officials and other critics question whether smaller districts are better than large ones. Small school districts, they point out, have faced huge financial difficulties in recent years. And they typically cannot afford the variety of special programs--for gifted children or those with disabilities--that Los Angeles Unified offers.

Secession opponents also say that organizing the Los Angeles Unified district’s schools into clusters has given parents, teachers and administrators more control over decisions affecting their schools.

The clusters usually consist of two neighboring high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed into them. Councils of parents, teachers, administrators, students and others have a say in everything from teacher training to safety standards.

“We’re trying to eradicate the bureaucracy,” said Yvonne Bryant, leader of the Banning/Carson cluster.

Tell that to Konig, who still remembers how angry she was when her first-grade son was transferred from teacher to teacher to teacher so that the school could accommodate students who had been bused in from overcrowded schools.

District officials say they have worked hard to cut down on the kind of bureaucracy that frustrated Konig. But despite the district’s efforts, supporters of plans to break up the 640,000-student district continue to multiply.

The most recent attempt is a bill by Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills), which would make it easier for communities to break away from the district by reducing the number of signatures required on the petition from 25% to 8%. It also would amend current law so the Los Angeles Unified School District board no longer has the power to veto proposals to break it up.

The measure could be tempered by a companion bill authored by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), which would require breakaway districts to provide the same legal protections currently in force for Los Angeles Unified’s students and parents. Those protections, mandated by federal and state court orders, include guarantees that students will not be segregated according to race and that all students will receive equal funding and equal access to good teachers.

The bills have passed the education committees and are scheduled to be heard by the appropriations committees of their respective houses next month.

Some secession advocates say they are worried about those provisions.

“Lomita wants its own school district, but it won’t look like Los Angeles Unified if it (succeeds),” Hargrave said. “This is a different community, and it’s just not possible for us to have the same racial breakdown as Los Angeles Unified.”

The ethnic makeup of the city of Lomita was, in fact, the main obstacle to supporters’ effort to form their own district seven years ago. The state Board of Education rejected their petition to secede, saying the loss of Lomita’s largely white student body would disrupt Los Angeles Unified’s integration efforts.

The racial issue, however, is not nearly as troublesome for Carson, which has almost equal proportions of African American, Latino and Asian residents.

“Carson is more integrated than I ever imagined,” said Carolyn Harris, chairwoman of the Carson Unified School District Formation Committee. “And the mix of the entire community would be reflected in our schools.”

Here is a look at the South Bay’s three breakaway movements:

Carson

When Carson breakaway proponents want to provide a visual example of why they are unsatisfied with the Los Angeles district, they often mention the dilapidated condition of Carson High School.

The outer walls of the brown, two-story building with blue doors haven’t had a coat of paint since the school was built in 1963. The latches on many student lockers have rusted away, and the doors are covered with graffiti.

But if you look beneath the surface, the high school has more going for it than appearances might indicate.

Since 1990, a council of teachers, parents, administrators and others has had a say in how the school spends about $140,000 in instructional materials. The group also sets discipline standards and class schedules, and, last month, even hired a new principal.

Secession advocates, however, are unimpressed.

“It’s really insignificant when you look at the whole picture,” Harris said. “It’s a facade.”

She and other supporters of the breakaway plan say the kind of control they envision would have Carson money flowing back into Carson schools. It would allow parents to make painting local schools a top priority. And it would enable them to enlist local businesses in the creation of a high-tech high school curriculum.

The proposed district, which would operate with an estimated $70-million budget, would educate 16,000 students in 17 schools.

Of the South Bay communities taking steps to break away from Los Angeles Unified, Carson has the furthest to go.

The formation committee, which hired a professional petitioner to gather signatures in support of the plan, hopes to submit its petition to the county committee by the end of the month. The county has 120 days to consider the impact of Carson’s secession on both Los Angeles Unified and the Compton Unified School District, which serves about 50 Carson students. The committee then files its recommendations with the state Board of Education.

Among the plan’s opponents are many teachers and community activist Roye Love, who served on the financing committee of a city task force that studied the breakaway proposal.

Love said he believes the breakaway plan will cost residents much more than supporters let on. He also believes the new district will have a hard time providing the educational program that Los Angeles Unified offers.

“It’s like asking people do you want a Ford or a Cadillac for the same dollars,” he said. “At first people say, ‘Yeah, I want the Cadillac.’ But they don’t realize it’s not for the same cost and that they will lose the quality they have.”

Carson secessionsists insist that the proposed school district would not cost taxpayers a penny more than they currently spend on Los Angeles Unified. The proposed district would receive the same funding and grants that the schools in the area receive now, they say.

“It’s an area that is large enough and has enough industry that (the proposed district) should be able to provide a full, comprehensive program for their kids,” outgoing Los Angeles school board member Warren Furutani said. “And Carson will have good racial integration. It’s a good mix.”

Lomita

Buoyed by the support Carson’s plan has received, Lomita secessionists decided two years ago to circulate a new petition on their breakaway plan.

The state Board of Education rejected Lomita’s last petition to form its own district in 1988, citing concerns that the proposed district, with its largely white population, would disrupt the integration efforts of Los Angeles Unified.

But this time around, the county committee supported the proposal; the state board is expected to take up the issue by the end of summer.

Because of dramatic demographic shifts within the city of Lomita, the proposed district would have greater ethnic diversity than it would have had several years ago.

Los Angeles Unified’s schools are under court order to have relatively equal proportions of African American, white and Latino students. Its integration programs ensure that Lomita schools are currently 28% white, 18% African American and 41% Latino. If Lomita wins the right to form its own school district, the ethnic breakdown of its student population would change to 44% white, 10% African American and 35% Latino.

Those figures are among the reasons some Lomita residents still oppose the breakaway plan.

“I think this is a separatist issue,” said Susan Weimer, 48, a Lomita parent whose children graduated a few years ago from Los Angeles Unified.

Secessionists take offense at the suggestion that race has anything to do with their wish to form their own district.

“Why does it have to be a race issue?” fumed Cindy Grant, one of Lomita’s chief petitioners. “That really angers me. Why can’t you want it because you want more local control?”

She and other secession proponents say they want more of a voice over how money is spent. They want a say as to when their children get winter and spring breaks. And they want to elect all of their school board members.

If allowed to leave Los Angeles Unified, Lomita would become one of the state’s smallest school districts. Only three schools serving about 3,300 students currently operate within the city’s boundaries.

The annual budget of the proposed district is estimated at $5.6 million. The Lomita district would receive the same state and federal funding that the schools currently get.

Breakaway advocates acknowledge that the tiny district would not be able to offer the range of courses provided by Los Angeles Unified. But, Hargrave said, “(students) would have more individual attention.”

Eastview

Of the South Bay communities seeking to defect from Los Angeles Unified, none has come so far--and had its hopes so dashed--as the Eastview community of Rancho Palos Verdes.

Once a part of the county, Eastview was annexed by Rancho Palos Verdes in 1983. Other parents in the city send their children to schools in the Palos Verdes Peninsula district, but Eastview residents have remained part of the Los Angeles district.

About 750 Eastview students attend six schools in Los Angeles Unified. The district has fought the community’s proposal, saying the flight of the primarily white students would disrupt the racial balance of local schools.

After a five-year fight, Eastview parents finally won the right in 1992 to hold an election on the matter. Residents overwhelmingly voted in favor of the proposal to join the Palos Verdes district, which has some of the highest test scores in the South Bay. But the results of the election were overturned when a Superior Court judge agreed with attorneys for Los Angeles Unified that the voting area wasn’t large enough. The decision was a crushing blow.

“When you’re up against Goliath, it can get real frustrating,” said Kari Tapie, co-chair of Residents for Unified Local Education, which organized Eastview’s secession effort. “We went through a legal process and got thumbs up at every step of the way, and then Los Angeles jumps in . . . to fight us in court.”

Despite their frustrations, Tapie and others have not given up hope. Although they opted against appealing the court decision, they are reviewing other options, which Tapie declined to enumerate.

“We’re recruiting new people and (considering) the next step to take,” Tapie said. “I can’t say more than that right now.”

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Although Los Angeles Unified is likely to continue fighting the secession efforts of Eastview and Lomita, district officials appear more tolerant of Carson’s bid for independence, vastly improving the city’s chances of winning state approval.

“We cannot allow an enclave of a particular race to leave,” said Los Angeles Unified’s General Counsel Richard Mason, alluding to secession efforts by predominantly white communities. “That’s why we went to court on Lomita and the Eastview section of Rancho Palos Verdes. The Carson effort, however, appears not to be such a case.”

Carson supporters are nevertheless working hard to build support for the proposal. They say they are encouraged by their prospects for success.

Lomita secessionists, who are now waiting for the state Board of Education to set a hearing date, are also hopeful about their chances. If their request is approved, Lomita residents could vote on the proposal as early as next year.

But as the Eastview experience shows, voter approval is no guarantee that the city will get its own school district.