Breakup Backers Hit Plan to Aid 100 Schools

San Fernando Valley activists seeking to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District on Tuesday assailed a plan to target the system’s 100 worst schools for improvement, saying the effort will drain resources from local campuses to address troubles elsewhere.

Just seven of the schools identified in a preliminary list are in the Valley; the vast majority lie in South Los Angeles. But rather than welcoming that as evidence that Valley schools are faring relatively well, breakup leaders predicted that the proposal would further erode local confidence in the school district.

“If you draw money away from the Valley, that’s not equitable,” said former Assemblywoman Paula Boland, whose 1995 legislation made an LAUSD breakup politically feasible. “It will be just another nail in L.A. Unified’s coffin.”

Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who pledged to improve the 100 worst campuses among the district’s 661 schools during his campaign for the job, insisted that no resources will be transferred from the Valley to pay for his plan.

Instead, Zacarias said, targeted campuses will be urged to reexamine how they spend their existing funds. For example, schools that have attendance problems might shift some of their money from hiring teacher’s aides to using extra counselors.

“I have absolutely no intention of taking from one school or one part of the city to assist in another,” he said Tuesday.

What remains unclear is how the district would pay for necessities such as new rooms to reduce large class sizes, a factor teachers often cite as a major obstacle to boosting student achievement.

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Zacarias said he intends to meet with principals, parents and union representatives to address the most pressing needs at each of the 100 schools, chosen on the basis of standardized test scores and scheduled to be released on a final list in the coming months.

“We’re going to sit down and collectively ask why, in this particular school, we have this problem,” he said. “Down the street, your neighbor maybe has better scores than you do, better attendance or lower dropout rates.

“If we can pull those 100 schools out of the lower bottom, there are going to be another 100 schools,” Zacarias added. “But all schools in this district should and need to improve.”

Some school district officials criticized the breakup proponents for displaying tunnel vision in their reaction to the preliminary list. Rather than crediting district officials for some measure of success in the Valley, they said, breakup advocates culled a self-serving meaning from the superintendent’s list.

School board President Jeff Horton said the fact that only seven Valley schools appeared on the preliminary list suggests that the Valley is well-served by the district. The Valley’s 226 schools contribute about one-third of the district’s enrollment, yet represent only a fraction--7%--of the worst-performing schools.

“The fact that schools with poorer students have lower achievement levels has nothing to do with whether the Valley should be a separate district. It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” Horton said.

“There aren’t a lot of schools in the harbor area and the Westside on the list,” Horton continued, citing other more affluent pockets within the school district. “But that doesn’t mean they need to be separate districts.”

Still, school breakup advocates argued that a simple list fails to capture the extent of problems in Valley schools.

They lambasted Zacarias for relying on only one criterion--standardized test scores--to choose the 100 schools. Other factors such as student transiency, attendance and limited English skills would have boosted the number of Valley campuses on the list, they say.

Splitting the district into smaller school systems, they argue, would be a more effective way to help students in the worst schools because campuses would have more local control over what they teach and how they spend their money.

“I commend the superintendent for looking at the issue, but we have a districtwide problem that is much broader than simply 100 schools,” said Scott Wilk, executive director of the Valley breakup group Finally Restoring Excellence in Education. “Clearly, we as a district do not match up well with the remainder of the state.”

Brad Sales, a district spokesman, said that Zacarias will consider those and other factors when drawing up the final list.