BATTLE FOR LAUSD BREAKUP COMES DOWN TO TODAY.

Byline: Sonia Giordani Staff Writer

A four-year-long effort to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District will come down to just 70 minutes of debate today when proponents and critics of the plan make their pitches to the state Board of Education.

Finally Restoring Excellence in Education leaders will have 30 minutes to present their plan to the 11-member board, which will determine whether it meets state criteria for school district breakup and should be put before voters.

Opponents - including LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer - will have 30 minutes to make their argument, which will be followed by five minutes of rebuttal by each side. Romer was not authorized to speak by the LAUSD school board to represent the district but he has taken the position that he and his staff are just offering their analysis that the proposal would harm the district.

The state board could make a decision as early as today.

``The central question is do the people in the San Fernando Valley want their own school districts, and an election is the only thing that will answer that,'' said Stephanie Carter, co-chairwoman of the Valley-based FREE.

But the grass-roots movement faces stiff opposition, not only from Romer, but from United Teachers Los Angeles, which spent more than $145,000 to defeat the Carson school secession movement earlier this year.

``We must protect the interests of the kids both in the Valley and in other parts of the district who we feel would be adversely affected by this plan,'' said Hal Kwalwasser, the district's general counsel, who will also speak during the public hearing.

The plan calls for removing 168 Valley schools from the LAUSD and forming two new, smaller districts roughly split along Roscoe Boulevard and Saticoy Street. The northern district would serve about 118,000 students, while the southern district would accommodate about 98,000.

The plan already has encountered challenges.

In June 2000, the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization considered the proposal but deadlocked 5-5 after its staff commissioned a survey that found it would cause a substantially negative effect on LAUSD finances.

It also argued that removing Valley schools would leave the remaining LAUSD with few white students, exacerbating segregation.

Last month, state education officials recommended the state board reject the breakup plan. The report disagreed with the county findings, concluding that the proposal would preserve student racial and socioeconomic balance and actually meet seven of nine state criteria for school district breakup.

But it concluded that the breakup would overburden already crowded campuses outside the Valley and make it more difficult for students to attend magnet schools - many of which are located in the Valley because of space availability. It said tax dollars from the Valley, which has about one-third of the people in the district, are needed to build the 85 new schools needed by the LAUSD, 90 percent of which would be outside the Valley.

State board President Reed Hastings declined to comment before the public hearing as did other board members.

Breakup proponents, including former Assemblywoman Paula Boland, who authored legislation that made breakup feasible, argue that their plan would restore control to Valley parents and taxpayers.

``We should be able to form school districts that are 100,000 students or so,'' said Carter, a former teacher in the Lennox school district whose daughter attended Los Angeles Unified public schools. ``If the state procedures don't allow for that, then something is wrong with this system.''

But opponents said the plan would effectively abandon the downtown neighborhoods and children, where schools are so overcrowded that children must be bused to less-crowded campuses hours away from their neighborhoods.

``The Valley represents 33 percent of the tax base and only 12 percent of the excess-student problem,'' Romer said in an interview earlier this week. ``It's just not good for the children of the district to take away the tax base that we all need to share in order to build us out of this problem.''

Teachers union President Day Higuchi also hopes to convince the state board to reject the proposal.

``Their obligation is to look at the state criteria for reorganizing school districts,'' Higuchi said. ``It would have an unfair impact on the remaining L.A. Unified to raise money for new schools. I think that's a powerful argument that the plan doesn't meet all the standards.''

He said the plan could also harm teachers' ability to negotiate not only for higher salaries but also for benefits. Higuchi said the union's 43,000- member size has allowed it to negotiate benefits for teachers that extend into retirement. Breaking up teachers into three different districts could diminish the resource pool.

``With this plan the whole system would be in jeopardy,'' Higuchi said. ``For the senior teachers that's one of the major harms we foresee being there potentially.''