District Breakup Bid Advances on Legal Front

Leaders of the group seeking to separate the San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles school system resubmitted their breakup petition Wednesday after obtaining a state legal opinion buttressing their contention that county school officials improperly rejected it.

A 11-page opinion by the state legislative counsel’s office went even further than a prior legal opinion in dismissing a county requirement that the group produce costly engineering maps of the two proposed districts.

With the new opinion in hand, leaders of Finally Restoring Excellence to Education appeared Wednesday before the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization to demand that the requirement be dropped.

Board members said they would schedule a special work session to consider the request, according to Scott Wilk, executive director of the breakup group.

Wilk said he was confident that the impasse, which has kept the group from launching its petition campaign, would now be quickly resolved. “I think today was a turning point,” he said. “I think they will have no option but to put through our petition.”

The dispute arose over a policy of the Los Angeles County Office of Education that has been in force 20 years without challenge.

Citing a section of the state Government Code, county officials have required petitioners for school district reorganizations to submit detailed legal descriptions of the proposed new district.

The requirement posed no obstacle to breakup petitions for the smaller cities of Lomita and Carson because city boundaries are already well defined.

But Wilk estimated that it would cost $100,000 and take six or seven months to produce such a map of the two proposed Valley districts.

Laurence B. Labovitz, an attorney for the activist group, protested that the proper standard should be a political map, accurate enough to determine who would vote in a breakup election. The more exacting map would be made after a successful election, at the expense of the new district, to establish taxation boundaries, Labovitz said.

Although the Office of Education’s own counsel concurred in a later written opinion, county school officials decided not to scrap the policy without an opinion from the state attorney general.

In the meantime, Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Granada Hills), a backer of the Valley breakup, went to the legislative counsel’s office, which returned an opinion stating, “the county Office of Education is not authorized to require petitioners to include a map and a legal description.”

With two concurring opinions, Wilk said he could see no justification for waiting any longer.

“If they do that, they’re just playing games,” he said.