Another District Breakaway Bid Starts

Days after voters shot down a schools secession bid in Carson, activists in a small community near Los Angeles International Airport handed in petitions Friday in a drive to leave a troubled high school district and add ninth through 12th grades to their well-regarded Wiseburn elementary system.

They hope their proposal to secede from the Centinela Valley Union High School District can go to voters in 2003.

“We know this was just the beginning of a long road, and it was the easiest part,” said John R. Peterson, one of the breakaway bid’s three chief petitioners. They collected 2,052 signatures in a little over two months.

Assuming that at least 1,610 of the signatures are found to be valid, Wiseburn advocates now must undergo county and state scrutiny, including permission from the State Board of Education to submit their proposal to voters.

And they are mindful of what happened in Carson, where voters Tuesday rejected a proposal to split from the Los Angeles Unified School District, 74% to 26%.

“We are trying to see what lessons we can derive from it and from other efforts too,” Peterson said of the Carson effort, which was the first Los Angeles system breakaway proposal to reach the ballot in more than 50 years.

Peterson added, however, that he and other Wiseburn leaders are more focused on selling their proposal to county and state education officials, who have been stumbling blocks for other movements.

County officials, for example, have recommended against a proposal for two breakaway districts in the San Fernando Valley, posing a disadvantage for leaders there when they face the state board next month. And the state board in 1999 refused to allow an election on a plan for the small South Bay city of Lomita to leave Los Angeles Unified and form its own district.

With the San Diego Freeway cutting through its eastern section, the Wiseburn School District is southeast of LAX and includes western Hawthorne and the unincorporated community of Del Aire. It enrolls about 1,700 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The largest ethnic groups among students are Latino, 53%; white, 31%; black, 7%; and Asian, 4%.

Officials in the Centinela Valley district have expressed concern about the possible negative impact that Wiseburn’s departure would have on the remaining system, especially if the larger Hawthorne School District goes too, leaving just two of the four elementary “feeder” districts. Secession leaders in Hawthorne are continuing to gather voter signatures.

Ernie Chacon, president of the high school district’s elected board, also has challenged petitioners’ assumptions that their students would be better off in their own districts. Chacon has said Centinela Valley has begun to turn itself around from its financial problems, political turmoil, low test scores and crowded campuses.

Two members of the Wiseburn school board who played a key role in launching the high school drive, Richard Wilson and Ron Nathanson, were defeated in their bids for reelection Tuesday. But Peterson noted that their successful challengers on the school board had campaigned on pro-secession platforms--an indication, he said, of strong community support for the breakaway.