Plan to Divide LAUSD Doesn’t Sway Critics

A plan by the interim Los Angeles school superintendent to give more power to local schools by dividing the system into 11 subdistricts was met with skepticism by leaders of efforts across the city to break away from the sprawling and ailing district.

Proponents of five breakaway movements in various stages across Los Angeles said the proposal announced last week by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines came too late and was too similar to other schemes that already had been tried and failed.

“It’s the same old face with a different mask on it,” said Stephanie Carter, co-chairwoman of the San Fernando Valley secession effort, called Finally Restoring Excellence in Education. “How many times can you repackage the same baloney?”

Cortines’ plan would decentralize power by reassigning hundreds of workers from downtown headquarters to the new mini-districts. It also calls for giving the mini-districts more control over how their money is spent. But secession proponents in the Valley, Carson, South-Central, South Gate and the Harbor area called it a reform attempt that ultimately would fail to dismantle the downtown power structure.

Valley school secessionists want to create independent northern and southern districts with about 100,000 students each and a boundary roughly along Roscoe Boulevard.

Carter and her group say smaller districts would streamline operations, improve access to administrators, allow for greater parent involvement and provide better educational opportunities for all of Los Angeles’ 710,000 public school students.

Although Cortines’ plan would divide Valley schools into three smaller districts built around high schools and headed by local superintendents, Carter said the proposal falls short of the autonomous school districts that FREE envisions.

“Semiautonomous is like being a little bit pregnant. Either you’re autonomous or not,” Carter said. “These new divisions don’t matter--and we know that having already lived through areas, regions and clusters--they’re just another organizational structure for downtown to manage.”

Neither Cortines nor school board President Genethia Hayes could be reached for comment.

In South Gate, Mayor Hector De La Torre said Cortines’ proposal is similar to a restructuring plan announced last October by former Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who left office Saturday after a protracted battle with the Los Angeles school board. His plan called for a dozen subdistricts, but it was short on specifics.

“I don’t see that it has many more details today than it did back then,” said De La Torre, whose city is considering launching a school secession feasibility study. “If you just clear out folks from downtown and move them to subdistricts, I don’t see the benefit.”

Although Cortines’ plan calls for 13-member advisory councils of parents and community members, Clint Simmons, chairman of the Inner-City Unified School District Formation Committee, said he doubts the panel would have much authority.

“It sounds good on paper, but let’s look into the details,” Simmons said.

Parents and members of the community who want to be involved in their local schools are often thwarted by bureaucrats who schedule daytime meetings and make end-runs around outspoken opponents, he said.

“The only parents many school officials were concerned about were the ones they were controlling,” Simmons said. “Parents and community activists should demand to know what is going on in the classroom, not just come in for coffee and doughnuts or to run the copy machine.”

Similarly, secession proponents in Carson said they doubt the advisory councils would have the power to make substantive changes in the nation’s second-largest school system.

“I don’t anticipate that with these new councils anything will change,” said Carolyn Harris, chairwoman of the Carson Unified School District Formation Committee. “They will give them the feeling that they are making a contribution when in fact they won’t be able to make a contribution.”

In announcing the plan, Cortines characterized it as “the first step in a process that will dismantle the old district culture and create the basis for lasting educational change.”

But Andrew Mardesich, director of the Harbor Study Foundation, said the only genuine change would be to dismantle the system. His group filed a request last week with the Los Angeles County Office of Education to launch a petition drive that would ultimately create a 90,000-student Harbor school district.

“They are asking our organization and others to give them another chance,” he said. “Why should we hold off and wait at the expense of the children?”