School District May Soon See a Rush for the Exits : Education: Afraid of being left out, even groups once opposed to L.A. Unified breakup now consider leaving.

Like insurgents quietly planning their revolutions, clusters of parents and politicians are gathering throughout Los Angeles to plot the dismantling of the nation’s second-largest school district.

Their efforts are largely fetal, disorganized and underfunded--fueled by a few activists with not-so-hidden agendas who are emboldened by state legislation making it easier for communities to divorce the giant Los Angeles Unified School District.

Since the legislation passed this summer, public discourse has focused on attempts to unify these groups--as disparate in philosophy as in geography--and develop a single coordinated plan for dividing up the 640,000-student district.

But behind the scenes a more likely scenario is emerging: Individual communities will secede one after another, helter-skelter. Those departures could snowball--foiling plans for a more comprehensive transition--as communities become fearful that being left behind will mean a dismal future in a diminished district.

“This is a race to the roses,” said Greg Magnuson, the county Office of Education consultant charged with researching the plausibility of break-off proposals. “The first [to secede] will get the gold and the others will get the spoils.”

If this breakup-by-gouge materializes, Los Angeles could end up with a mishmash of more segregated school districts, some with excess classrooms and others grappling to find space for their students.

“Conventional wisdom says that wealthier areas would try to pull out first, leaving . . . the district less white and poorer than it already is,” said Charles T. Kerchner, an education professor at Claremont Graduate School.

At least seven communities are considering plans to form their own school systems--smaller districts that they say would be more responsive to the needs of students and the demands of their parents.

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These proposed new districts could also have a decidedly conservative bent, because the breakup effort is germinating, in part, as a challenge to the status quo.

Most of the breakup leaders espouse back-to-basics methods in the classroom. Some would seek state permission to end bilingual education programs; others would reverse what they consider Los Angeles Unified’s liberal policies.

“Gay Pride Month would not be celebrated in a Lomita Unified School District,” said Bob Hargrave, who has spearheaded a campaign to form a separate district in Lomita for nearly a decade.

Lomita and its South Bay neighbor, Carson, are rushing to move their separations forward before Jan. 1, to beat the enactment of the new law’s protections for racial diversity and funding equity.

In South-Central Los Angeles--the greenhouse for some of the strongest opposition to previous breakup campaigns--even the area’s representative on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board now sees a separation plan as an important defensive measure.

“I’m not going to hide my head in the sand,” said board member Barbara Boudreaux, who includes a breakup progress report at her local district meetings.

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Similar protective postures are being struck in other areas, largely in response to a push by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and the breakup bill’s author, San Fernando Valley Assemblywoman Paula Boland, to forge a comprehensive plan for carving up the district.

Their plan would settle skirmishes over dividing the riches and theoretically protect poor and minority communities from becoming the losers. Increasingly, however, some view those efforts as unwelcome paternalism, at best.

“We will not be caught flatfooted while Riordan and his boys come in and make a plan,” said Clinton Simmons, who is among those guiding South-Central Los Angeles’ separation movement. “We will do for ourselves.”

The fact that minorities--many of whom previously fought the breakup--are instead forming their own dissolution plans is perhaps the greatest difference between this and past efforts.

Raul Ruiz, a Cal State Northridge professor of Chicano studies who vehemently opposed previous breakup bids, attributes the shift to a growing dissatisfaction with the city’s schools and a mounting distrust of bureaucracy.

“They have learned from the past that oftentimes when the train leaves the station, it is much too late to jump on,” Ruiz said. “I think [breakup] is a fait accompli . . . so it is responsible for folks to examine the most viable alternatives.”

Such resignation has supplanted accusations of racism and elitism in other historically critical quarters, too.

The union representing the district’s 28,000 teachers--once a breakup foe--has turned its attention toward ensuring that the union retains its power in any newly formed districts.

The school district itself has appointed a top administrator to provide information to breakup advocates, and a majority of the school board has agreed to evaluate specific proposals before taking a position. Even board members who oppose the breakup say they feel no urgency to jump into the fray.

“The only cure for this is time,” said board President Mark Slavkin. “As months go by, people will calm down a little bit and realize this is a longer-term issue.”

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There is no hint of that calming phase in the basement of a mosque near USC, where Clinton Simmons and four other activists pore over computer printouts central to their goal of forming an inner-city school district.

The printouts, breaking down public school enrollment by census tracts, illustrate their greatest strength: numbers.

Nearly 120,000 children attend Los Angeles Unified schools in the neighborhoods of Downtown, West Adams, Crenshaw, Hyde Park and South-Central Los Angeles. Add to that the 15,000 or so who are bused from those areas to suburban schools and the total is about a fifth of the district’s enrollment.

More important, these children generate extra education funding from the state and federal government because many are poor or not fluent in English.

“The majority of the money coming into this district is coming for the inner city,” said parent Elbert Washington. “We’ll just put it under new management and take care of our own house.”

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Long before they took the helm of South-Central’s germinating breakup campaign, Washington and Simmons became fixtures at Los Angeles Unified school board meetings. There, week after week, they have used the meeting’s public testimony period to assail the district for its AIDS prevention education and campus programs for gay youths, which Washington calls public support for “pedophiles” and “sodomites.”

Their breakup vision is a back-to-basics school system that would shun experimental teaching methods and promote conservative moral values--a message likely to gain wide acceptance in inner-city neighborhoods with more than their share of gang activity, teen-age pregnancies, low test scores and high dropout rates.

They also can tap into parents’ distress over having to bus their children far from home because of the area’s crowded schools. Their plan would end busing by returning schools to two daily rotations of students--known as double sessions--and by moving support services such as child care off campuses.

Among their first crucial tasks may be explaining to the community that an inner-city district would officially end the integration struggle. But this may not be harsh news in a district that is already nearly 90% minority.

“I have faced the fact that integration is already over,” said board member Boudreaux. “People don’t want to say this, but segregation is back. It’s awful, but it’s real life.”

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Segregation is precisely what doomed Lomita’s last attempt to split from Los Angeles Unified.

The blue-collar city just inland from Los Angeles Harbor first tried to wrest control of its schools from Los Angeles Unified in 1987 and got as far as county approval. But the State Board of Education--which has the final say--rejected its application, saying that a separate school district would increase segregation because the proportion of white students in Lomita schools would have ballooned from less than a third to more than half.

A population shift since then may be Lomita’s salvation. Though a separate district would still have more white students than it does now, it would remain predominantly minority.

“I looked at the demographics and I said, ‘We’re not all white anymore. They can’t criticize us for that,’ ” said Hargrave, a former city councilman.

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So with a sense of deja vu , volunteers marched door-to-door, amassing enough signatures to support the ballot petition--3,000, or 25% of registered voters, because their bid preceded legislation which requires only 8% of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

But a year later they are still waiting for state review and feeling the hot breath of the breakup newcomers.

“We’re just a little hole in the dike,” said the city’s mayor, Dave Albert, whose two children--like almost half the city’s youngsters--have transferred to public schools outside of Los Angeles Unified.

“Once we blow the hole--if we’re able to--it’s just a matter of time before the whole district falls apart.”

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For two years, Carolyn Harris has been traipsing door to door in Carson, asking for signatures to support her vision of a local school system just one-fortieth the size of giant Los Angeles Unified.

The Carson Unified School District she envisions would have just 17 schools, and its 16,000 students would be given more homework and face stricter discipline than she remembers her five children receiving in Los Angeles Unified schools.

And parents and teachers would have a greater say in running their campuses, said Harris, who says she would run for a seat on the new district’s governing board. “We want . . . our teachers and administrators to participate with parents in what we will become,” she said.

Harris has only a few weekends of signature-gathering left to meet the goal of 13,000 for submission to the county. But resistance could be brewing.

James Peoples, president of the Carson-Torrance branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, says he wants to see specific examples of how the new district would boost student achievement. So far, he said, the breakup group’s support lies in the vagueness of its message.

It’s hard to argue with vows to improve education, Peoples said, because “that’s like being against apple pie.”

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Across the county, in the sprawling San Fernando Valley, breakup proponents are concentrating on how to divide the area’s 180 schools and still maintain ethnic and racial balance.

But the sheer size of the Valley, along with the complexity of the region, threaten to leave it as a breakup straggler, even though it led the legislative charge.

“We believe people will be falling all over themselves to get in line [to break away],” said teachers union President Helen Bernstein. “But the Valley will take longer because it’s not unified in any way.”

But Valley breakup advocates dismiss that skepticism and say they will not let political obstacles block them from developing a plan for multiple Valley districts.

Currently several Valley groups are vying for control of the campaign, and suspicions abound: One group says another has forgotten the children in its political frenzy, another says its political know-how will be essential to gain voter approval in the 200,000-student area.

Some--such as the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn. and

the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley--have taken an early lead by actively studying the issue. Others are waiting to see how Boland’s notion of a districtwide plan evolves.

Boland says she plans to create a separate political action committee to raise money for breakup campaigns, not just in the Valley, but anywhere in the district.

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“I haven’t met a parent yet who’s said, ‘You know, I’m so happy I have my child in L.A. Unified and they’re getting a good education,’ except [school board President] Mark Slavkin,” she said. “I want to be the facilitator for these parents.”

To many, the Valley’s efforts to break off still look like a way to pull up the drawbridge, reminiscent of the region’s past resistance to busing for racial integration.

In the East San Fernando Valley, where schools are more crowded and families poorer, parent activist Tony Alcala is organizing minority communities into their own breakup group to protect their interests in any Valley secession plans.

“I need to be sure if it’s really going to benefit our kids,” Alcala said, “or if it will be business as usual.”

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Though the cities of Gardena and Bell Gardens are different in many ways, they have embarked separately on nearly identical approaches to the breakup drive: Draw up a plan that can be used as a shield if necessary.

In Gardena, the impetus comes from a fiercely independent city government that has hired former Los Angeles school board member Warren Furutani as a consultant to help sort out the city’s options, ranging from forming its own district to creating an educational alliance with neighboring South Bay communities.

In Southeast Los Angeles, government, school and community activists from Bell Gardens and six other cities have been meeting in recent months to talk about secession.

They must find appropriate answers for parents upset about busing, about insufficient textbooks, about bilingual education and whether it is really working.

Yet whether seeking complete autonomy would ever be a palatable response is still unknown in the communities of Maywood, Cudahy, Bell, Huntington Park, South Gate, Vernon and Bell Gardens.

Said high school teacher Ric Loya, a Huntington Park councilman: “If there’s a consensus now, it’s not to break away.”

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Where the southernmost finger of Los Angeles Unified dips into Rancho Palos Verdes, the tiny community of Eastview went farther down the road to breakup than any others--and lost its footing just when it thought it had arrived.

Eastview fought for five years to send its 750 school-age children to the small Palos Verdes Peninsula district next door. They won government and then voter approval in 1992, then lost a court battle with Los Angeles Unified.

Now Eastview is trying a different tactic, asking Los Angeles Unified to let parents there choose which district they prefer. The two campuses in Eastview--which receive more than 2,000 students from other neighborhoods, about half of them bused in--would continue to be operated by Los Angeles Unified.

What supporters assuredly do not want is for the district to fold them into the secession mass, said Eastview parent leader April Sandell. “We don’t like to be regarded as a breakup effort.”

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Dividing the School District

San Fernando Valley: Several disparate groups have formed to spearhead breakup efforts in this traditional hotbed of support of such a move.

180 schools

175,000 students

Inner-city school district: Support of a South-Central district are busily planning their first community wide forum set for today.

100 schools

135,000 students

Southeast Los Angeles: Representatives from seven cities have been meeting in recent weeks to begin drafting a separation plan as a defensive measure.

Gardena: The city of Gardena has hired former Los Angeles Unified board member Warren Furutani to research its options, including breakup, with an eye toward financial feasibility.

Carson: Breakup supporters are hastily trying to gather enough voters’ signatures to put a ballot proposal before the state and county by the end of this year.

17 schools

16,000 students

Lomita: A 1987 proposal to separate Lomita was denied by the state. Now backers are trying again.

Three schools

2,000 students

Eastview: This appendage of Rancho Palos Verdes got voter approval to secede in 1992, but was blocked by a court battle with Los Angeles Unified. Now parents are seeking the option of sending their children to the nearby Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District.