School District Breakup

Re “District Breakup Would Cost Valley Students, Funds,” March 23.

As a magnet school teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District, I read with interest your article on how a breakup of our district could affect our student population. Your maps and graphs were particularly informative.

I used to work in the Hub Cities area, which is nearly all Latino. You show the bordering Inner City area as having approximately two-thirds Latino and one-third black. These geographic areas contain households with the lowest per capita incomes in L.A. County and also [encompass] areas with the highest population density west of the Mississippi River. There is no doubt that great needs exist for students living there.

Sylvester Hinton justifies an Inner City school district because students are not being bused into this area to integrate schools. What an Inner City school district would actually do would be to further isolate a community of students that has limited opportunities. Many teachers and administrators would be relieved to not have to deal with the great needs of these students who are bused into their schools.

JAIME GOMEZ

Los Angeles

* One could write a long letter and do a careful disaggregation analysis of what is wrong with The Times’ computer study of the LAUSD breakup. The fact that California state laws were ignored and the fact that the year, 1994, and the place, San Fernando Valley, picked for comparison were the exact time and place of the largest urban natural disaster to ever hit a major U.S. city, which resulted in major population dislocations, both could explain many of the extreme conclusions drawn.

But it really can be boiled down to: When you commission a study based on illegal criteria, guess what? You get invalid results.

DIANA DIXON-DAVIS

Chatsworth

* Doug Smith’s article suggests the breakup could [result in] 3 or 12 districts, but it fails to recognize the significance of the complex. As a parent of three children who have attended LAUSD schools for the past 12 years, I have been impressed with the accountability of school administrators and staff when a district is organized into complexes (one high school, feeder middle school and feeder elementary schools). For example, the North Hollywood instructional cabinet, consisting of parents, teachers, administrators and classified staff from 11 schools in a close geographical area, is in the best position to know what is needed by their particular mix of students.

If breakup of the school district occurs, I favor one district in the San Fernando Valley composed of 16 complexes (one for each high school in the Valley). The central management of 16 complexes should afford some economies of scale when implementing federal and state educational guidelines but allow freedom to each school community organized around one high school to evaluate the needs of their student populations.

Smith’s article shows there is much diversity within the San Fernando Valley community. If the Valley were compared to school districts in Western and Midwestern states, our diversity would be the model of an ideal school district. We represent a microcosm of what the world could look like if we all worked together.

In dealing with the breakup of the school district, the issue should not be the ethnicity of students but how a local community can better serve the academic and career needs of the students.

BARBARA ROLLER

North Hollywood