BOARD LEADER PROPOSES SPLITTING MASSIVE LAUSD.

Byline: Helen Gao Staff Writer

Los Angeles Unified - the nation's second-largest school district - should be broken into more than two dozen independent districts to give parents local control, the president of the school board said Tuesday.

Caprice Young - a one-time breakup opponent - announced her proposal just four weeks before the March 4 primary in which retired teacher Jon Lauritzen is challenging her bid for a second four-year term.

``I believe education needs to be personal,'' said Young, 37, the mother of three children. ``That means having school districts on a human scale. Three-quarters of a million (students) are not on a human scale.''

Young envisions neighborhood school districts, each with its own administration and school board. Parents, teachers and administrators would exercise full control over their school's finances, curriculum and other aspects of public education.

Young's plan calls for creating a citizens commission to study splitting up the LAUSD, which encompasses 704 square miles and serves 746,000 students. The panel's recommendations would be put before voters and, if approved, would be implemented in five to 10 years.

Lauritzen, who has gained the support of United Teachers Los Angeles in his bid against Young, dismissed her breakup proposal as ``playing politics.'' Young's 3rd District largely encompasses the west San Fernando Valley, where voters supported seceding from the city of Los Angeles.

``Caprice Young's 'big announcement' is little more than shameless pandering by a desperate politician who has failed our children,'' said Lauritzen, the father of two, in a printed statement.

In contrast, he said, his platform calls for putting credentialed administrators back into the classroom to relieve a critical teacher shortage. He also wants an immediate audit of district-owned facilities to identify classroom space and relieve overcrowding.

Superintendent Roy Romer did not return a call for comment.

But just last month, Romer pledged to make education more personal for students by creating ``schools within schools'' - programs that would cater to students' individual needs.

Young's proposal is surprising because she has long opposed any breakup of the sprawling district. In 1999, when a citizens group successfully gathered enough signatures for a petition to divide the LAUSD into three districts, Young expressed opposition.

But that was before her district was reconfigured to include a swath of the West Valley, where there was strong support for the movement to secede from Los Angeles. Although Valley secession was soundly defeated citywide in the Nov. 5 election, it was favored by a slim majority in the Valley.

Young denied that her campaign platform has been influenced by the politics of her new constituents. She said she gradually came to embrace breakup after repeated decentralization efforts failed to bring local control.

``After having done this for four years, I see there is a constant pull to recentralize this district,'' she said. ``One of the things I have fought for over and over again is to decentralize the district and push more authority to local districts and school sites.

``It simply gets recentralized over and over again. Given that, we really need to break it up.''

Officials reorganized the Los Angeles Unified School District into 11 minidistricts in 2000 and, before that, LAUSD schools were grouped in clusters, but both efforts failed to live up to their promise to deliver local control.

John Perez, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said he was unconvinced a district breakup would improve public education.

``I can't emphasize enough the size of the district has nothing to do with student achievement,'' he said. ``The only place where size matters is the number of kids at the school and the number of kids in a classroom.''

Lauritzen's media campaign seized on the fact that Young voted with a board majority last May to increase class size by an average of two students as a cost-saving measure. In response to public outrage, Young later supported a motion to study the possibility of reversing the class-size increase.

Stephanie Carter, who led the 2001 petition drive to break up the district, was buoyed by Young's change of heart.

``I think it's great. The district needs to be broken up,'' said Carter, head of Finally Restoring Excellence to Education. ``The fact is, the school district is not serving the children well. It can't handle this enormous amount of population.''

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