DOING THEIR HOMEWORK : 2 VALLEY ADVOCATES OF LAUSD BREAKUP KNOW THERE ARE MOUNTAINS TO MOVE.

Byline: Steven J. Gorman Daily News Staff Writer

Debate over breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District has slipped quietly to the background in the six months since a new law went into effect that makes it easier to break up the district.

But two longtime parent activists, Diana Dixon-Davis and Stephanie Carter, have continued working behind the scenes on a campaign to split off schools in the San Fernando Valley and form smaller school districts.

Juggling their kids' sporting events and drama auditions with countless public meetings, phone calls and planning sessions, the two women face a formidable array of obstacles in their quest to restructure L.A. Unified.

The task of forming a breakup plan and selling it to voters promises to be technically complex, politically ticklish and fraught with racial overtones, but Carter and Dixon-Davis exude confidence and a belief in their cause.

``It's something I feel very passionate about,'' said Carter, 47, of Tarzana.

``If you put the two of us together, we can move mountains,'' Dixon-Davis, 51, of Chatsworth, said of their partnership.

Indeed, mountains are what the two women and their committee of 15 to 20 fellow parents and community activists are up against.

Besides opposition from the teachers union to any division of L.A. Unified, breakup supporters face disagreements within their ranks over whether the Valley and its 190,000 public school students should be carved into one, two or several new school districts.

In addition, strained relations persist between the Parent Teacher Student Association, which came out earlier this year in favor of a breakup, and Dixon-Davis, a former PTSA officer who quit the organization in the spring of 1995.

Any L.A. Unified reorganization also must meet a set of rigorous county and state criteria, including mandates that school district reorganization ``not promote racial or ethnic discrimination or segregation.''

Breakup advocates say they suspect those guidelines may eventually be used as the legal basis to challenge their plan.

``This is not, as it goes down the road, going to be a fun thing,'' Carter said. ``This is going to be nasty.''

Still, former state Senate President Pro Tempore David Roberti, who appointed the two women to an advisory commission he created in 1993 and later named them to co-chair a task force that studied earthquake preparedness in schools, said he thinks they're up for the job.

``They're both diligent, hard-working, dedicated, honest and tenacious,'' Roberti said. ``They predate me as far as Valley activism. I leaned on their advice quite a bit.

``I think they're good politicians, although they may not look at themselves as politicians,'' Roberti said.

It was on the earthquake safety task force in 1992 that the collaboration between Dixon-Davis and Carter first gelled.

``We started working and we found out we were great,'' Dixon-Davis said. ``We could work very well together.''

Adds Carter, ``We both work well with other people, too.''

They teamed up again last year in Sacramento to lobby for passage of legislation sponsored by Assemblywoman Paula Boland, R-Granada Hills, to strip L.A. Unified of its power to veto a breakup and reduce the number of signatures needed to qualify a breakup plan for the ballot.

The bill was signed into law by Gov. Pete Wilson in August and took effect in January. Three months later, Carter and Dixon-Davis convened their first meeting of parents and fellow community activists to begin devising a breakaway plan for the Valley.

Both women said the desire for a school district breakup evolved from frustrations they have experienced over the years as parents of L.A. Unified students.

Carter has a daughter in high school. Dixon-Davis has a son entering sixth grade, a second going into 10th grade and a third who just graduated high school.

They say the underlying problem with L.A. Unified - the second-largest school district in the nation with a K-12 enrollment of 649,000 students - is that it's too big, bureaucratic and unresponsive.

``Local needs are often ignored in favor of one-size-fits-all school policies. I really think education is best delivered on a local level,'' Dixon-Davis said.

``Children in Los Angeles are not getting the services they deserve from their public education,'' said Carter, who taught school in the Lennox Elementary School District about 20 years ago. ``They are encumbered by a huge bureaucracy that is so far removed from what goes on in the classroom that it can't be effective any longer.''

Both women bristle at suggestions that racial motivation is behind their campaign.

During debate on the breakup bill last year, state Sen. Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles, charged that Valley parents were pushing for a breakup as a vehicle for halting the practice of busing inner-city children into the Valley from overcrowded schools in their own neighborhoods.

``This is not going to end busing,'' Carter said. ``Kids have to have a place to go to school, whoever they are, wherever they are. I usually say that at the beginning: `It's not going to end busing,' and those people usually leave.''

Dixon-Davis contends that minority students account for the overwhelming majority of L.A. Unified students in the Valley.

``Why are there racial overtones when you are creating schools that are 70 to 80 percent minority?'' she said. ``Nowhere else in America would that be considered a case of white flight.''

They also note that the first area to formally petition for a breakaway from L.A. Unified under the Boland bill was a group from South Central Los Angeles in March.

The most strident opposition to any breakup of the school district is currently coming from the United Teachers-Los Angeles, the union representing L.A. Unified's 32,000 teachers, counselors, librarians and other faculty.

``We see it as being harmful to kids,'' UTLA Vice President Michael Cherry said. ``If you start breaking the school district up into pieces, you're going to create more bureaucracy, you're going to have more school boards, and you're going to end up with . . . probably larger classrooms.''

The teachers union supports moves toward decentralization of the district and reform programs, such as the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN, that aim to shift more control to the schools, Cherry said.

Mike Roos, the president and chief executive officer of LEARN, said he empathizes with the frustrations of breakup advocates but believes his 3-year-old reform program ``is really beginning to bear fruit.''

``Theirs is still a far-away campaign,'' Roos said.

Breakup advocates say they lack faith in the ability of L.A. Unified to reform itself. But even among supporters of a breakup, there is a divergence of opinion on the shape any new district should take.

Julie Korenstein, the only school board member whose district is entirely in the Valley, prefers creation of a single new district, rather than the multidistrict breakup scheme favored by Dixon-Davis and Carter.

With a single district of close to 200,000 students, ``you get economy of size and you get serviceability,'' while avoiding duplicative administrative costs, Korenstein said.

Carter and Dixon-Davis, however, are experimenting with plans to form four or five separate school districts in the Valley, each with 40,000 to 50,000 students.

Bobbi Ferrell, who headed a breakup study by 31st District PTSA, agreed that creating several Valley districts would be preferable from an educational standpoint.

``There are many studies that talk about 10,000 to 50,000 being the optimal number (of students),'' she said.

But the PTSA study found that a multidistrict scheme would make it difficult to achieve ethnic, racial and socioeconomic balance demanded by state and county guidelines, Ferrell said.

Those demands could be more easily met by dividing the Valley roughly in half, she said.

Both Dixon-Davis and Carter are veterans of parent activism around education issues in the Valley.

Carter has been involved in the L.A. Unified breakup movement since the late 1980s, serving at one point as president of the breakup advocates United Parents of Los Angeles, which is defunct.

She also sits on the state Board of Behavioral Science Examiners, which licenses educational psychologists, clinical social workers and family counselors.

Dixon-Davis, who worked as a research associate for the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago before moving to Chatsworth in 1980, has brought her training and background as a demographer to bear in the L.A. Unified breakup battle.

A member of the state Democratic Party central committee since 1991, Dixon-Davis also was active in lobbying for a state ban on assault weapons following the Stockton playground massacre in 1989 and later worked to develop maximum classroom heat standards in L.A. Unified.

Education and demographics figured heavily in two other issues Dixon-Davis has tackled in the past decade.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, she was active in the campaign to ensure that additional schools were built for the Porter Ranch development, and in 1992 she helped develop a redistricting plan that would have allowed the Valley to maintain two full seats on the Los Angeles school board.

Defeat of that plan in favor of a redistricting scheme that left only one board seat entirely in the Valley is widely seen as helping to fuel the most recent moves to split the Valley off from L.A. Unified.

But Dixon-Davis' activism also soured her long ties with the PTSA, which had been on record as neutral on the breakup question from 1993 until June.

Ferrell said Dixon-Davis created friction with the PTSA by leaving the impression at times that she was speaking on behalf of the organization.

Dixon-Davis denies misrepresenting herself.

``The PTSA had very restrictive rules about who may speak,'' she said. ``They felt I had no right to speak or act on an issue as long as I was a member of PTA.''

The two women said they hope their group will be ready to submit a breakup plan and petition to the county by the end of a year.

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Photo

Photo: Parent activists Stephanie Carter, left, and Diana D ixon-Davis are determined to see massive L.A. Unified broken into smaller Valley school districts.

Myung J. Chun/Daily News