School Secession Plan Fails to Get County OK

A plan to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District failed to win approval Wednesday from a county panel charged with recommending to the state whether to put the issue before voters.

The 11-member Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization voted 5 to 5, with one member absent, on a plan to split the 711,000-student district into three autonomous systems, two of them in the San Fernando Valley.

The proposal required a majority vote from the members, who are elected by school district governing boards throughout the county. The split vote is tantamount to a negative recommendation to the State Board of Education on whether the issue should be put before district voters. Brenda Gottfried, a school board member with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, was absent for personal reasons, county officials said.

Despite the vote, school secession leaders refused to accept defeat.

“We have to remember that this is for the children,” said former Assemblywoman and breakup leader Paula Boland. “We’re still going to the state in full force.”

During an emotional and contentious five-hour public meeting, county members, breakup activists, L.A. Unified officials, parents and teachers debated the proposal created by the citizens group Finally Restoring Excellence in Education.

The county will forward the group’s proposal and its recommendation to the state Board of Education, which will ultimately decide whether to call an election. The state, which has no timeline, has not determined who would vote in an election--all district voters or just those in the areas proposed for new, independent districts.

The county panel based its recommendation on nine legal criteria required under state law. After much debate, members decided that it met all but the requirement that the proposed districts have sufficient funding.

“That was the big one,” said Lloyd de Llamas, committee chairman and a former manager in several Southern California cities. He voted in favor of the group’s proposal, in part because he wanted the issue to go before voters, he said.

Last week, a consultant’s report found that the proposal met most of the state’s breakup criteria but could result in ethnic segregation and lack of sufficient funding.

The findings by an independent consulting group in San Diego County were based on public comments, U.S. census data and state and local school district documents.

Secession leaders criticized the report, contending that it lacked pertinent data and made inaccurate assumptions.

Even county committee members seemed perplexed.

“I’m not a CPA,” said Frank Bostrom, a business owner and a community planner in the South Bay. Bostrom, who voted against the plan, said he was concerned about how the prospective loss of desegregation funding would affect the three districts.

The report found that a Valley breakup would decrease the percentage of white students in the remaining L.A. district from 11% to 6% of the total student population.

Although the white student population is already decreasing in the district, the report stated that a split could accelerate the process and impede its ability to maintain the current desegregation program.

“I’m not blind to the ills and ilks of LAUSD but dividing into three districts won’t make the situation better,” Bostrom said.

Opponents who attended the meeting, including United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, warned committee members that approving the breakup proposal could generate segregation-related lawsuits.

Terence McConville, district director of litigation research, told committee members that the district was concerned about the displacement of 8,000 students who are bused into the Valley from crowded neighborhoods.

Several committee members said they are not opposed to breaking up the district, but they would have preferred to see even smaller districts proposed in the Valley.