South L.A. Group Seeks to Form School District

With a blistering attack on incompetent teachers and declining student achievement, a South Los Angeles group on Saturday launched a long-awaited petition drive to break away from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

After more than two years of preparation, members of the Inner City School District Assn. inaugurated their effort during a midday presentation to about 30 people at the Labor Community Action Center in Watts.

“We want to provide our children a world-class education,” said Sylvester T. Hinton Jr., the association’s corresponding secretary. “Our community is tired of being a dumping ground for L.A. Unified’s worst-performing teachers.”

The plan calls for a new district of 134,000 students in 153 schools that would stretch through central Los Angeles from Olympic Boulevard to the Century Freeway. The district would be about one-fifth the size of Los Angeles Unified.

To qualify the proposal for the ballot, petitioners must obtain the signatures of about 8,700 registered voters within the district’s proposed boundaries. Organizers said they believe they will meet the requirement by July.

At the event, speaker after speaker, including Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Granada Hills), charged that, like some other school systems in California, Los Angeles Unified suffers from a lack of teacher accountability, test scores that are among the state’s lowest and a cumbersome bureaucracy unresponsive to the concerns of parents.

“Teachers love their unions more than their students,” said Dafer M. Dakhil, the association treasurer. “They love their contracts and work rules more than their profession.”

Organizers played a nine-minute videotape of two Los Angeles Unified board members, Julie Korenstein and John Horton, who they said exemplify the district’s problems.

In one sequence, Korenstein delivers a rambling soliloquy in which she tries to explain why district test scores are so low. Among other things, she blames poverty, malnutrition, drugs, poor infant care, inadequate language skills and bad parenting. Horton says poverty is one of the main reasons for poor student performance.

“Our kids aren’t brain-damaged or anything else,” said Nelle Ivory of Los Angeles, who has four children and six grandchildren. All attended school in the district. “The problem is with the teachers and curriculum. In the last 30 to 40 years, the quality of education has gone down while the money to support the district has gone up.”

Barbara Boudreaux, a Los Angeles Unified school board member who attended Saturday’s meeting, said that when she was principal of Birdielee Bright Elementary School on 36th Street several years ago, 14 of her 36 teachers were rated unsatisfactory by the district.

“Los Angeles Unified should work to try to fix its problems,” said Boudreaux, whose district takes up a large portion of inner-city Los Angeles. “If L.A. Unified can’t fix its problems, maybe the district should be broken up.”

But supporters of secession efforts within the district’s vast territory said it might be too late for Los Angeles Unified to heal itself.