Brown’s School Days Influence His Opposition to Breakup : Education: Assembly Speaker says splitting up L.A. Unified would bring back segregation. Secession advocates in South Bay disagree.

SACRAMENTO —  Growing up in Mineola, Tex., in the 1940s, Willie Brown attended all-black schools and graduated from Mineola Colored High School in 1951.

Now, as the powerful Speaker of the California Assembly, Brown cites that firsthand experience in segregated Mineola as a reason he opposes the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

If the huge district is cut into smaller pieces, the 59-year-old San Francisco Democrat told reporters late last week, “You’d end up with all-white schools. You’d end up with all-black schools. You’d end up with all-Hispanic schools.”

But Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) countered that the aim of his bill, which could carve the Los Angeles district into smaller districts, is to boost local control, not segregate students.

“Los Angeles is a much different place” than the Texas of Brown’s birth, Roberti said in an interview. He described Los Angeles as a “quintessentially integrated place.”

In the South Bay, advocates for a breakup of the district have said race was irrelevant to their concerns, contending that the South Bay’s ethnic diversity would mute any arguments that a breakup would segregate students.

Secession advocates say the giant, financially troubled Los Angeles district is simply too big to address the needs of all of its students.

Activists in Carson, Lomita and the Eastview area of Rancho Palos Verdes have been the most vocal in the South Bay’s secession drive. Carson plans to ask voters in a June 8 non-binding referendum if city officials should pursue leaving the Los Angeles district.

South Bay secession groups have said that they see Roberti’s proposal as their best chance at achieving separate districts.

Because Roberti is the leader of the state Senate, the prospects for his bill to win approval in the Legislature’s upper chamber are high. But because Brown, his opposite number in the Assembly, is against the breakup, the chances of passage in the Assembly are much less favorable.

For now, Roberti said he is not counting his votes in the Assembly but instead focusing his energy on securing support for his bill among colleagues in the state Senate. Under his proposal, a commission would be established to suggest a formula for breaking up the 640,000-student Los Angeles Unified into at least seven smaller districts, and the commission’s plan would be put before voters at the November, 1994, general election.

After winning approval Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee, the measure goes to the Appropriations Committee, which is expected to review the proposal within the next month.

Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he favors the breakup proposal and suspects that Roberti has the clout to push it through the Senate. Presley said the district seems to have so many problems that it would be governed better if broken into smaller units.

On the Senate floor, where the bill could be considered later this spring, Roberti is expected to win a majority of the 40-member house but still face tough questioning from some other Los Angeles Democrats, particularly inner-city lawmakers.

For example, at Wednesday’s Education Committee hearing, Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) emphasized the proposal’s cost to taxpayers. “Each of the new school districts will have to spend taxpayer monies to duplicate administration, staff and services, not to mention the cost of seven school board elections,” Watson said.

Watson unsuccessfully sought amendments that would restructure the existing district, not dismantle it.

Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) emphasized that Roberti should expect a variety of legal challenges to his measure if Gov. Pete Wilson signs it into law. He said, however, that some of these could be minimized if he would spell out more clearly the duties of the 26-member commission charged with writing the breakup plan.

Speaker Brown said that he was not familiar with the details of Roberti’s measure. When told about the proposed commission, a quizzical Brown said “that doesn’t sound right.”

Brown emphasized that he would give Roberti’s bill a fair hearing but that his own opposition to carving up the district “is not a negotiable thing.”

“If it says it breaks up the L.A. district, I will not vote for it,” said Brown, who earlier this year negotiated a plan to avert a strike by Los Angeles teachers.

The Roberti bill is opposed by United Teachers-Los Angeles and the California Teachers Assn. And some lawmakers have suggested that Brown has joined in the opposition because teachers are a major source of campaign contributions for Assembly Democrats.

But one Democratic senator said Brown is reflecting the strong opposition to Roberti’s proposal by African-American community groups to whom Brown “is close . . . politically and emotionally.”

Brown said that no matter how noble Roberti’s motivation, dismantling the sprawling school district would lead to segregated schools like those he attended in Mineola.

Harking back to his own education, Brown said that the Texas schools were set up to be “separate but equal,” but in reality such schools are “anything but equal.”

“I don’t want to go back” to that era before federal courts mandated an end to segregated schools, Brown added.