Dispute Delays Drive to Break Up L.A. Unified

An impasse with county education officials over an arcane point of law has put a hold on the plans of San Fernando Valley activists to place their proposal for two new school districts on the ballot.

Frustrated leaders of the Valley school breakup movement concede that they cannot budge the Los Angeles County Office of Education from its insistence on costly petition requirements that the activists contend are intended solely to impede them.

The same requirement has stalled the petition of another group that announced plans more than a year ago to form a separate school district in South-Central Los Angeles.

Three maps submitted by the Inner City School District Formation Committee have been rejected as inadequate by the county, said the group’s co-chairman, Clint Simmons.

“It’s ridiculous,” Simmons said. “It amounts to a stall tactic on the part of the county.”

To settle the dispute, Valley breakup leaders have agreed to seek an opinion from state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, a request that will take at least six months, said Scott Wilk, executive director of Finally Restoring Excellence to Education.

As a result, the group has shelved until later this year a signature-gathering campaign that it had hoped to already have underway. Wilk said the delay will push back the earliest possible vote on the petition from November 1998 to June 1999--costing proponents a full academic year.

State law requires proponents of a school district breakup to have a map of the proposed district certified by the county office of education before circulating a petition.

Once sufficient signatures are obtained, the petition would be submitted first to the county, then the State Board of Education, which ultimately decides whether to call an election.

At issue is the county’s contention that state law requires those seeking to secede from a school district to produce exact maps, complete with legal descriptions.

A lawyer for the Valley breakup organization argued that the law only requires a much cruder map used to establish voter residency.

The more complex map, needed for tax assessments, should be prepared after a successful election, and then at the expense of the new district, said attorney Laurence Labovitz.

The county office’s policy has been in effect without challenge for 20 years, and has not been as large a hurdle to most successful school district reorganizations, which are small.

To produce legal descriptions of the two vast districts proposed for the Valley would take six to seven months and cost $100,000, Wilk said.

When the Valley group announced its petition plan in March, Labovitz said he was optimistic that county officials would drop the policy because he had shown that it was based on a misinterpretation of the state Government Code.

In response to the challenge, the county office asked its attorney, Thomas M. Griffin, for an opinion. In a lengthy April letter, Griffin sided with Labovitz, telling his clients that they had been applying the wrong section of the Government Code.

Despite the adverse opinion, county officials declined to scrap the old policy.

“What we’re trying to do is have consistency,” said Frank Kwan, director of communication for the county office. “We’ve had consistency for 20 years. Now we have an opinion that says something different. We need to be assured the path we follow, if it is a change from past practice, that there is sufficient reason to do so.”

Wilk and Labovitz accuse the county office of duplicity and conflict of interest in siding with the Los Angeles Unified School District in an attempt to frustrate the breakup drive.

In a May 22 letter to County Supt. of Schools Donald Ingwerson, Labovitz protested that a county education official conferred with a lobbyist for the Los Angeles school district in its decision to turn the matter over to the attorney general.

“We find that highly unethical and highly suspect,” Wilk said.

County schools Deputy Supt. Marilyn Gogolin denied that a conflict of interest occurred. She said the conference involved the county office’s own lobbyists, one of whom may also be retained by the Los Angeles schools.

There was no obligation to include the Valley group, Gogolin said, because it is only one of several petitioners that might have differing interpretations.

Seeing no other way around the stalemate, however, the Valley group agreed to refer the dispute to Sacramento.

Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), the breakup movement’s main backer in the Capitol, will submit a request to the attorney general for an opinion, said Wilk, who is also McClintock’s chief of staff.