School Board Votes to Pare Subdistricts From 11 to 8

In a compromise that allowed Supt. Roy Romer to keep much of a local administrative system intact while still instituting cost-cutting measures pushed by the teachers union, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday night to reduce the number of geographic subdistricts from 11 to eight.

The board’s 5-2 vote capped a day of protests outside the Los Angeles Unified School District’s downtown headquarters and weeks of negotiations and lobbying behind the scenes. While United Teachers-Los Angeles did not get the local districts abolished as it originally sought, the union nonetheless got a partial symbolic victory that is expected to cut about 165 administrative jobs and save about $17 million.

Romer earlier had sought to maintain all 11 subdistricts but said he came to the conclusion that a reduction to eight subdistricts would not harm the academic progress the school system has made in recent years.

“I felt I had to come to the table and propose a solution that would ... put us in a position to save some dollars and defend this district,” Romer said before introducing his compromise solution.

Voting for the measure were board members Jose Huizar, Marguerite Poindexter-La Motte, Jon Lauritzen, Julie Korenstein and David Tokofsky. Marlene Canter and Mike Lansing voted no.

Lauritzen, who earlier had introduced a union-backed motion to replace the 11 districts with four, five or six subdistricts, told his fellow board members why he now supported Romer’s plan for eight.

“We’ve gone through the rhetoric time and time again,” Lauritzen said. “The superintendent made a good case for eight districts. We have gained much from the discussion. The time is right to get on with the issue and go forward.”

However, Canter, who introduced a motion to keep all 11 subdistricts, chastised other members for placing what she called rhetoric and politics before the needs of children.

“This is not a spectator sport,” Canter said. “As seven board members, we are talking about dismantling a district that is not only succeeding but succeeding at rates people didn’t even expect.”

Canter’s motion failed by a vote of 3 to 4. Only Lansing and Tokofsky joined her in supporting it. But Tokofsky later voted with the majority to approve the plan for eight subdistricts.

The debate had been underway for about two hours but stalled shortly after 9 p.m., when board member Lansing questioned whether some of the behind-the-scenes discussions had violated the state’s open-meeting law. The board adjourned into closed session to hear from its lawyer whether it could legally proceed with a vote Tuesday night and emerged 20 minutes later with board President Huizar saying he was satisfied that no violation had occurred. The final vote came around 10 p.m.

Under the plan, the eight local districts each would serve student populations of between 63,000 and 116,400. Each would have a local superintendent, three elementary directors, two middle-school directors and two senior high directors.

The new configuration will retain some of the geographic characteristics of the 11, but each obviously will be larger. For example, instead of three local districts, the San Fernando Valley will now have two. Romer said district officials drew the map with an eye toward maintaining community identity and distributing as evenly as possible the low-performing schools.

Romer said he would begin his work to restructure the district today when he meets with the 11 local superintendents. Before the month is out, he must decide who among them will keep their jobs and who will be bumped down a notch in the district hierarchy to a director position. That will set in motion a complicated procedure that might eventually see a school principal or two displaced and returned to teaching in the classroom.

At UTLA’s bidding, several hundred teachers, both retired and active, showed up to support the union in its fight to abolish the subdistricts.

Dressed in the red shirts that designate them as UTLA members, they circled the district’s headquarters, chanting, “Hey, hey, what do you say. Mini-districts go away” and “Hey, hey what do you say. UTLA is here to stay.”

The teachers union had sent postcards to its 45,000 members urging them to “heat up the board” by demonstrating in front of school district headquarters.

Some teachers hoisted a giant red and black sign at the corner of 3rd Street and Beaudry Avenue that read “LAUSD Hands Off Kids’ Funds.”

The 126-seat board room was filled to capacity, and about 100 people watched the proceedings on a television monitor in a room nearby.

Phyllis Hart of the Achievement Council California, a nonprofit education organization based in Los Angeles, told the board that in her 30 years in public education, the district structure has been reorganized 10 times.

But none, she said, had made a difference before the subdistrict system, which she credited with helping narrow the achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian peers.

The local subdistricts, each of which currently oversees between 59,000 and 80,000 students, were introduced to L.A. Unified in 2000 by then-Interim Supt. Ramon Cortines.

Cortines pushed for the subdistricts as a way to reduce central district bureaucracy. But many saw a political motivation as well: The nation’s second-largest school district was under pressure from various groups working for its breakup and the subdistricts were seen as a way to help quiet those voices by putting administration closer to parents and schools.

Cortines spent six months drawing the boundaries of the 11 subdistricts to reflect community identity and even gang affiliations.

UTLA had pushed hard in recent months for eliminating the subdistricts, alleging that they represented L.A. Unified’s misplaced priority on administration instead of teaching.

UTLA President John Perez had repeatedly assailed the subdistricts in public meetings as symbols of a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy.

With lobbying and rallies, the union had increased its pressure on Romer and the seven-member board, five of whom were elected with at least some financial support from UTLA.

However, on Tuesday night, Perez said his union would accept the plan for eight subdistricts as long as the savings were passed on to schools and parent ombudsmen were appointed for each subdistrict.

“I think eight is acceptable to our members,” Perez said.

The school board has struggled in the last few months to bridge a roughly $500-million gap in its $5.7-billion operating budget. It made cuts in central and local district administration and in clerical and support staff.

But about $49 million more in cuts must be made to balance the budget by June 30.

Last week, the district offered the teachers union a proposal that seemed to back away from a potential confrontation over healthcare benefits and some other issues.

In a letter to Perez, Richard Fisher, the district’s representative in the contract negotiations, wrote that healthcare benefits would remain unchanged and that some funds for classrooms and counseling programs that UTLA wanted would be restored.

The district previously had sought to force teachers to pay for more of their healthcare costs with higher deductibles and other measures.