Assembly OKs Bill to Ease L.A. School Breakup : Education: Measure reduces the number of signatures needed to put proposal on ballot. Critics of long-term effort say splitting the huge district would pit community against community.

Breathing new life into the movement to split up the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Assembly on Thursday passed a bill making it easier for voters to mandate a breakup of the sprawling, 708-square-mile district.

The bill, by Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills), eases the way for breakup advocates by lowering the number of petition signatures needed before the issue can be placed on a local election ballot.

Parents in the San Fernando Valley have for 20 years sought to dismantle the massive district as a means of improving education. Typically, however, they have run into a brick wall when it came to getting the idea past the Democrat-controlled Assembly.

“For years I’ve dreamt and dreamt and dreamt this would happen, and finally it passed,” Boland said. “Sacramento is listening to what the parents want.”

The vote was not welcomed, however, by some legislators representing other parts of the city.

“This is a bad bill because it pits community against community,” said Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles). “It says, ‘We want to break up into little, special districts and grab all the goodies, and the rest of you will hang out there.’ ”

The bill next goes to the Senate, where it must pass muster with Democrats there, who historically have been more open to the idea than their Assembly counterparts.

An elated Boland, who literally jumped for joy at the 43-24 vote, said the outcome was a signal that Democratic Speaker Willie Brown’s longtime grip on the Assembly has loosened.

“I think the point of this is the Assembly is not totally Speaker-controlled any longer,” Boland said, calling the vote historic.

Boland, who has tried and failed with similar measures since she arrived at the Capitol in 1990, admitted she has become emotionally attached to the breakup cause.

“You’re not supposed to get married to bills, but I’m married to this one,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It was tears of joy that I had today.”

Five Democrats joined Boland in voting for the bill, including two key San Fernando Valley colleagues, Richard Katz of Sylmar and Barbara Friedman of North Hollywood, who in the past had sided with Brown and teachers unions against such measures.

Rising in opposition to the bill, however, were several Democrats who passionately warned of divisiveness if the measure passes.

Assemblyman Wally Knox, a Democrat who represents the Westside and parts of the western San Fernando Valley, praised the Los Angeles Unified school that his children attend, and said legislators are wrong if they think creating smaller districts will automatically lead to better education.

“I see no reason--none, zero, zilch, none--to believe that if we replicate L.A. Unified’s bureaucracy six or seven times over on a theoretically smaller scale that we will gain a darn thing,” Knox said. “When we can’t solve real problems, sometimes we tinker with the process, pretending that it is a solution.”

In a departure from years past, Boland used a soft-sell to win her colleagues’ support. Instead of arguing the merits of dismantling the district, she cast her bill as a “voting rights” measure, calling it a “democracy bill” because it would allow voters to make a decision.

“This is so we can empower parents to choose to do what they want,” she told Assembly members.

The bill reduces the required number of signatures to get the issue on the ballot from 25% of all registered voters in the district to 8% of those who cast ballots in the last gubernatorial election.

The latter standard, Boland said, is the same threshold used to determine whether a proposed constitutional amendment makes it on the ballot.

The measure also strips the school board of the power to veto ballot language.

In the Senate, Boland is counting on support from state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who has a breakup measure of his own that is linked to the Boland measure.

Senate committees on education and appropriations have already approved Hayden’s bill, which requires any new district to comply with federal court orders mandating racial balances and equal funding.

But Boland said she was not taking anything for granted in the Democratic-controlled Senate, even with Hayden’s help. “Now we start the fight over again,” she said. “It’ll be tough going again over there.”

Provisions in the Hayden bill should help address the traditional Democratic opposition to taking apart the ethnically diverse district, she said.

Brown and other Democratic leaders have said their primary fear is that affluent suburban parents would try to create exclusive districts that keep out inner-city kids.

In a worst-case scenario, Brown said, he envisions a rebirth of opportunities for segregation and funding inequities if Los Angeles Unified were parceled into perhaps seven smaller districts, as some proponents have advocated.

However, Boland has dismissed that argument, saying that smaller districts could be made to comply with court-mandated desegregation requirements included in Hayden’s bill.

Boland says the parents she represents are more interested in improving education than in creating islands of pupils segregated by neighborhood.

They are convinced, Boland said, that the Los Angeles district is far too large to operate efficiently. Many are discouraged from participating in school board meetings, for example, by the sheer distance they have to drive to get to Los Angeles Unified headquarters, Boland said.