EDITORIAL ROMER'S BAND-AIDS TEPID PLAN WON'T REPEL REFORM EFFORT.

``AKIN to sending Band-Aids to Baghdad,'' is how school board member David Tokofsky describes Superintendent Roy Romer's plan for saving the LAUSD. This assessment seems generous at best.

What Romer proposes is spending $36 million -- out of a $6 billion budget -- to rehabilitate and academically bolster 17 under-performing Los Angeles Unified School District high schools, none of them in the San Fernando Valley.

Romer unveiled this vision on the same day it was learned that 14 percent of LAUSD seniors were unable to pass the high school exit exam. That rate is significantly worse than the 10 percent statewide rate, and would probably be a lot worse if a third to a half of the LAUSD's students didn't drop out of school altogether.

Romer's announcement coincides with the gathering movements to either break up the district or put it under the mayor's control. No connection, he says, but it's hard not to see one when he's now as possessed by fending off reform as he used to be with new buildings.

Still, it's a good sign. The educational establishment is scared to death of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his takeover effort. But it will take more than symbolic gestures like this one to overcome the political capital the mayor has to spend fighting for control.

Consider just how little Romer is proposing:

A little money for a few schools to hire more teachers and counselors? Spending some bond funds for capital improvements at some neglected schools?

Yawn. The teacher-counselor money is already in the pipeline, with Sacramento promising to repay old debts. And isn't school construction and repair exactly what voters were promised when they picked up the tab for $19 billion in school bonds?

All in all, Romer seems to be giving the public what it had every reason to think it was already getting. At best, he proposes that the district start doing what it should have been doing for years, while neglecting the fundamental question of governance that's at the root of what's broken.

The ultimate answer is to give control over the schools to the community, to parents and teachers. And it may be that mayoral control is a stop along the way to breakup. Symbolic gestures are not.