Residents Seek Split From L.A. Unified : Schools: In pursuing succession from the huge district, they call for control of education in their communities.

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.

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.

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.”

Although Los Angeles Unified is expected 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.