First Steps Taken for New School District

A south Los Angeles group intent on severing ties with the Los Angeles Unified School District on Thursday became the first to file a breakaway proposal as allowed under streamlined state legislation.

The proposed boundary map filed with the county Office of Education shows an Inner City Unified School District about a fifth the size of Los Angeles Unified. The proposed district stretches roughly from Olympic Boulevard to the Century Freeway and would include 125,000 students at 123 schools.

The drive to split off south Los Angeles began last summer when a group of frequent critics of Los Angeles Unified met to talk about their dissatisfaction with the sprawling school system.

“There’s no academic performance in the inner city, our kids are not learning,” said Sylvester Hinton, a spokesman for the organization whose son attends Sixth Street School. “We have inferior textbooks and not enough textbooks. . . . Reform just isn’t happening here. There’s so much wrong.”

Mayor Richard Riordan made good on an earlier promise Thursday by putting up $40,000 of his own money to start a breakup review group at UCLA. Mayoral aide Greg Dawley said Riordan will also try to raise money to fund the UCLA effort.

Ted Mitchell, dean of UCLA’s graduate school of education, emphasized that his group will remain neutral on breakup proposals. He said they will make sure that “people ask the right questions. . . . We will hold up a mirror to those plans.”

Los Angeles Unified officials have countered the breakup movement with increased publicity about their reform efforts. Last fall, Supt. Sid Thompson announced a five-year plan to improve student achievement.

“There has already been some improvement--attendance has been improved at many inner-city schools and some have gone up in standardized test scores too,” said Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers. “But the fact is we are not satisfied either. There are no celebrations going on here yet.”

Wohlers said the district wants to review the Inner City Unified application to make sure it preserves “the gains made by this school district for all children” in areas such as desegregation and bilingual education.

Legislation by state Sen. Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) that took effect Jan. 1 reduced the number of signatures required to support such a proposal, increasing interest among Los Angeles Unified opponents. Boland and Riordan have said they will craft a a districtwide breakup plan.

Members of the south Los Angeles group have made it clear that they are not interested in having a map drawn by outsiders, saying that inner-city areas always come up short in such plans.

Although the San Fernando Valley has been the center of the breakup movement in recent years, Valley groups remain embroiled in negotiations over proposed district boundaries. The city of Carson, which filed its map before the Boland legislation, added 10,500 signatures to support its breakup proposal last week.

The president of the district’s teachers union, who has said the breakup is inevitable, said the inner city may have the least to gain by breaking away.

“If I were a parent in that community, I would not sign that [breakup] petition because I think it’s going to hurt those kids,” said United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein.

Proponents of the inner-city secession effort believe they would have more control over supplemental federal and state education funds that come to the inner city.

Also, anti-union sentiment is strong there and some see secession as a way to diminish UTLA’s power.

Bernstein, however, pointed out that state law would only allow new districts to eliminate the union if the teachers approved the move.

The proposal duplicates some of the efforts being made in the area to create a cluster of semiautonomous charter schools around Crenshaw and Dorsey high schools. Hinton, the proposal spokesman, said he views the charter plan as an interim measure.

Filing the map is only the beginning. Next, county public works officials have one month to review the boundaries.

If the map is approved, signature gathering can begin inside the area. Under the Boland legislation, the number of signatures required to prompt county hearings on the proposal has been reduced to 8% of those who voted in the last governor’s election.

According to rough estimates by the group, that would be about 10,000 signatures. County hearings would follow, then state certification and a local election.

“At least it’s a start,” said Clinton Simmons, one of the Inner City Unified backers. “I guess a lot of people never expected us to get this far.”

Times staff writer Beth Shuster contributed to this story.

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Breakup Plan

The proposed Inner City Unified School District would span 132 square miles south of downtown Los Angeles. It would include 123 schools and serve nearly 125,000 students.