Valley Secession Drive Turns Its Focus to LAUSD Split

Leaders of the stalled secession campaign said during a citywide forum Saturday that breaking up the massive Los Angeles school district should take precedence over their drive to split the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles.

“More people are dissatisfied with the school district than with the city of Los Angeles,” said Richard Close, chairman of Valley VOTE, the group pushing for the San Fernando Valley to form its own city. “Never before has there been such a force behind this issue. We have to seize the momentum.”

About 110 community leaders, parents, teachers and politicians from the South Bay, Eastside, Westside and the Valley attended the three-hour meeting Saturday to discuss their common interest in dismantling the 710,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest.

“We are not here to gripe about the problems,” said Close, although everyone agreed that recent controversies have spurred the momentum.

Those problems include the power struggle between the Los Angeles Board of Education and Supt. Ruben Zacarias. The toxic contamination at the Belmont Learning Complex and two schools in South Gate. Low test scores. Tangled layers of bureaucracy. Overcrowding. Outdated textbooks and library books. Asbestos. And on and on.

“The district is totally out of control,” Close said at the forum, held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. “Time is running out. There’s only one opportunity to educate a child. We must move quickly.”

By February, Close said, he hopes the group can gather and submit to state officials at least 65,000 signed and verified petitions, a move that could help prompt legislation and support among local and state school board members.

City secessionists from the Valley and Harbor areas suffered a major setback in September when the Local Agency Formation Commission, the nine-member panel overseeing secession studies, estimated completion of the studies could take as long as four years--twice the previous prediction.

Although Saturday’s forum was sponsored by Valley VOTE, those attending--including mayoral candidate Steve Soboroff and Los Angeles Councilman Joel Wachs--generally agreed that people of all backgrounds and from all parts of the city must unite to successfully break up the district.

“No system will work unless everyone buys into it,” said Wachs, generating a round of applause.

For more than a decade, groups in the Valley, Carson, Lomita and South-Central Los Angeles have advocated forming separate school districts. Saturday’s meeting was the first time the groups met and agreed to work together as part of a new coalition called the All-District Alliance for School Reorganization.

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As Los Angeles Unified faced an onslaught of bad news, in the past month politicians--including Soboroff and Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), also a mayoral candidate, began to consider splitting up LAUSD.

State Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar), who for seven years has supported dividing up the district, sent a letter Nov. 10 requesting that the state Senate Office of Research undertake a study on how smaller school systems can “provide better accountability to the needs of students, parents and teachers.”

In the study, Alarcon wants the state to study other large urban school districts that have undergone breakup, as well as evaluate options for how LAUSD could be divided into districts of no more than 100,000 students.

State Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) is drafting legislation to create smaller districts.

“Rather than having chunks of the district break off, we’re looking into a comprehensive citywide plan,” said spokesman Bill Mabie.

Earlier this month, the Little Hoover Commission, the state’s watchdog agency, recommended the appointment of a panel of community leaders and professionals to examine breaking up the district, which it called “a disturbingly dysfunctional organization.”

So dysfunctional, breakup activists said, that even the well-regarded Ramon C. Cortines, who will soon be interim superintendent, probably cannot repair the huge mess.

“We have no time to waste,” said Yvonne Chan, principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, a highly praised charter school in Pacoima.

Chan proposed that the alliance divide into four geographic areas but share resources, work together and meet regularly, beginning in a week or two.

“We want to take charge” when Cortines becomes superintendent on Jan. 16, Chan said.

Meanwhile, members agreed to seek more people reflecting the city’s ethnic and geographic diversity, as well as form committees to research issues such as boundaries, costs and the secession process.

District officials have warned that a breakup is more complicated than it appears. It could even hurt the students, said Gordon Wohlers, an assistant superintendent in charge of policy, research and development for LAUSD.

With an estimated 14,500 students being bused because of overcrowding, returning students to their home schools would leave many campuses even more squeezed for space.

Los Angeles school board President Genethia Hayes called the breakup movement “hysteria” resulting from the board’s bold actions and said she “is not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.”

Instead, Hayes said she will focus her energy on improving student achievement and reforming the district. “By the time these people finish gathering their petitions, looking at the legal issues and wrangling--and believe me there will be fighting--over how it’s going to work and who gets what, they will see a district that works.”

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Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles oppose breaking up the district because the resulting school systems could create more layers of bureaucracy and diminish clout in Sacramento, said John Perez, a vice president with UTLA, the 41,000-member union that represents district teachers, nurses, librarians and psychologists.

“We will have a larger number of districts, each with its own bureaucracy,” Perez said. “Each will have its school board, its superintendent, its deputy superintendent, the deputies to the deputy superintendents.”

But more school districts would also mean “we could have board meetings in our communities,” said Andrew Mardesich, who is leading efforts to form the Harbor area into its own city, although he too is focusing on an LAUSD breakup. “We would have board members who know the South Bay, because for most of Los Angeles, the South Bay isn’t on anyone’s radar screen.”

Mardesich and other South Bay activists would like to see a 90,000-student district that would include students from Lomita, San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City, Carson, Gardena and the eastern part of Rancho Palos Verdes.

“I know it won’t be easy,” he said. “But if we could give students a better education, it is worth it.”