LAUSD BREAKUP DEAD STATE BOARD RULES VALLEY SPLIT WOULD DISRUPT DISTRICT PLANS.

Byline: Sonia Giordani Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO - The State Board of Education unanimously refused Thursday to allow voters to decide whether to break up Los Angeles Unified and create two new school districts in the San Fernando Valley.

The vote ended a four-year campaign waged by Valley-based Finally Restoring Excellence in Education after one of its leaders, former Assemblywoman Paula Boland, spearheaded the repeal of restrictions that would have made breakup all but impossible.

LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer carried the day, insisting the district is ``on the march'' and promising at the public hearing preceding the vote to complete construction of 80 schools within five years and resolve overcrowding and the facilities crisis within 10 years.

``I'm willing to come back eight to 10 years from now (to discuss breakup),'' he told the board.

After the 10-0 vote, he offered to reach out to the Valley.

``For now, I hope we can get on with cooperative issues. Let's sit down with this group and make them partners. I want to make the Valley feel more a part of this district and not like an appendage. It's one of the largest and fastest-growing areas, and we need their support.''

FREE leaders took the decision hard but said it was too soon to determine whether they could take any further action.

``I'm very disappointed, obviously,'' said Stephanie Carter, FREE co- chairwoman. ``This district is too big to be manageable, too many kids fall through the cracks.

``And the district keeps making promises, promises, promises.''

Board President Reed Hastings insisted that members' hands were tied because the state Department of Education found the Valley proposal met seven criteria for a breakup vote, but failed on two others.

``Our decision in this case is not based on what we prefer,'' he said. ``It is based on how the proposal meets the criteria our elected legislators debated and enacted into law.''

Board members agreed with department staffers that a breakup would be disruptive. They said creating north and south Valley districts would make it more difficult for students remaining in the Los Angeles Unified School District to continue attending school programs, especially magnet schools, which are mostly located in the Valley.

They also agreed that the breakup would make it more difficult to build schools because it would drain the LAUSD of one-third of its tax base - located in the Valley - while 90 percent of the schools will be built elsewhere.

Prior to the public hearing on breakup, the board heard from LAUSD representatives on a separate matter relating to school construction. That gave Romer a chance to introduce his new facilities team and its plan to build new schools.

Board members said they were impressed by the new attitude shown by LAUSD officials and recent improvements in elementary test scores.

``Something is changing down there,'' said board member Suzanne Tacheny, a former LAUSD consultant.

``The fact that they can set student priorities for students' needs and commit to it signifies a change in the district's culture.''

Carter, Boland and former Valley Rep. Bobbi Fiedler argued that the LAUSD is monolithic - larger than 16 state governments - with more than 70,000 employees and an annual budget of $9 billion.

They pointed to reports by a Los Angeles County grand jury and the state Little Hoover Commission that criticized the LAUSD for mismanagement.

They also noted that the district has bungled the handling of millions of dollars in bond money entrusted to it by local taxpayers, recently reporting an estimated $600 million shortfall to complete projects funded by the $2.4 billion Proposition BB bond measure passed in 1997.

And they argued that Valley voters, at least, should have been given the chance to vote on the proposal of a breakup.

``Give us democracy,'' Boland told the board. ``Let us take 300,000 children ... out of this dysfunctional system and put them in a system where parents can have more accountability and can make a difference in their children's education.''

Afterward, she said: ``What the school board did here is give the district another 10 years. They gave up another generation of kids to the pit bulls. They gave LAUSD 10 more years to mess up these kids' lives.''

But board members insisted the district is turning itself around. They took turns praising the new administration's commitment to building schools and its recent successes with first-graders' test scores.

The FREE proposal, they said, failed to solve ongoing problems facing the nation's second-largest school district.

``It only creates three massive organizations,'' said Tacheny, noting that the remaining district would still be the largest in the state and that the two proposed Valley districts would rank third and fifth in size.

``I am impressed and hopeful after hearing from staff. I don't think it's worth the disruption to transition from one large district to three large districts,'' she said.

``I agree with Suzanne - LAUSD is finally making some changes,'' said board member Nancy Ichinaga, a former teacher, principal and school psychologist from Inglewood. ``I would not like to be part of destroying that.''

Vicki Reynolds, a board member from Beverly Hills, said she was concerned the proposal would ``leave the remaining district drained of opportunity,'' and concluded that problems caused by interrupting instruction would outweigh the benefits of breaking up the LAUSD.

Susan Hammer, vice president of the board, said she didn't want ``to pull the rug out from under the district'' just as it was showing a ``tremendous turnaround.''

``That would be totally unfair to the kids in this district,'' said Hammer, who added that she was willing to give Romer time to make Los Angeles ``the model urban district in this country.''

Romer, the 72-year-old former governor of Colorado, led the district's defense, supported by United Teachers Los Angeles, whose representative, Burbank attorney Jesus Quinonez, said breakup could jeopardize federal and state funding for magnet schools and strip the LAUSD of socioeconomic and racial diversity.

Romer, touting himself as an outsider who ``saw this district as one of the most interesting challenges,'' acknowledged the LAUSD's history of mismanagement, which secessionists said included the half-completed, $175 million Belmont Learning Center fiasco, and conceded that the district had not completed a single school in a 20-year period.

But with some test scores improving, and crediting his new facilities team with a concrete plan to complete school construction, Romer maintained that his district is ``on the march.''

He asked the board to keep the district intact and preserve the Valley's lucrative tax base so the LAUSD can preserve its bond capacity and receive the funding it needs to complete new school construction.

``We have got to build ourselves out of this problem,'' he said. ``We need this district to stay together because if we don't have that unified tax base, we will lose our ability to build.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) - Paula Boland

(2 -- color) - Roy Romer

(3) - Stephanie Carter

FREE co-chairwoman