Dissatisfaction Fuels Drive to Dismantle L.A. Unified : Education: Parents, leaders say bureaucracy is unresponsive. Local control is seen as a solution.

For Carson Mayor Michael Mitoma, it was the peeling paint on the walls of his city’s high school--which had not been painted in 30 years--that made him cast his lot with those advocating the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

For Northridge homemaker Jill Reiss, it was the August her two children spent in sweltering classrooms, attending school on a year-round schedule intended to ease campus crowding in neighborhoods far from her home.

For Hamilton High School parent Linda Rosen, it was bungling by district bureaucrats that almost cost her Westside school the chance to hire the principal that a local panel had selected after a nationwide search.

With its “local control” battle cry, the drive to dismantle the Los Angeles public school system is gaining momentum, picking up support not just from politicians courting votes but from disaffected parents and community leaders with a litany of complaints. Their gripes reflect not only the district’s educational shortcomings, but its aggravating failure to do even the smallest things right.

“It has gotten to the crisis point, where we’ve got to look at the alternatives,” said Mitoma of Carson, home to 17 Los Angeles Unified campuses. “The bottom line is: I don’t think it’s possible to do any worse.”

Though branded by critics as elitist and racist, the campaign to divide the nation’s second-largest school system into several smaller districts is neither monolithic nor unified.

The drive was born in the mostly white, middle-class west San Fernando Valley. But it has grown by tapping into a groundswell of dissatisfaction over big issues, such as falling test scores and rising campus violence, and little ones, such as dirty bathrooms and canceled Christmas programs.

A Times poll in February found that support for breaking the district into smaller, independent school systems cuts across geographical lines, although the strongest support is among residents of the Valley and Westside.

Many of those jumping on the breakup bandwagon say their frustrations have been mounting for years, fueled by deteriorating services and what they see as a lack of concern by the leaders of a district that can no longer afford to meet basic student needs.

“We get requests to provide hand towels and soap and toilet paper for our schools because the schools have run out,” Mitoma said. “I looked at a carpet that was in a school; it had never been cleaned for five or six years. You have kindergarten children sitting on this carpet day after day, and the school district says they have no money to shampoo it, only to vacuum once a week.”

Over the past four years, the district has reduced its $3.8-billion budget by almost $1 billion--an amount equivalent to 30 times the annual budget of the city of Carson--by cutting back on maintenance services and extracurricular activities, increasing class size and reducing employee salaries.

The cuts--and attendant bickering among employee groups and school board members over how best to reduce spending--have created a public perception that the giant district is out of control, sucking up resources to feed a bloated bureaucracy while shortchanging the children it is supposed to serve.

“There are so many special programs and you look at all the administrators they have for each one,” Mitoma said. “You look at the (high) pay scales for these people, the stories about the superintendent having a driver who made $70,000. . . . Those are the kind of things that leave you with a jaundiced eye.

“It’s just such a massive organization, their budget reads like the Congressional Record. . . . I doubt if they even know where the money’s going.”

While breakup supporters acknowledge that smaller districts would not receive more money--and might even receive less per student--they believe local control would allow them to keep closer tabs on school spending.

“There’s a tremendous feeling in the community that the district doesn’t manage its funds as well as it could,” said Reiss, who leads a Valley-based group advocating the breakup. “There’s too much money going through too many channels and falling through too many cracks that’s unaccounted for.”

Breakup opponents argue that the size of the Los Angeles system allows it to save money by purchasing supplies in large quantities, but Reiss said mismanagement by district officials cancels that advantage.

“It makes sense, but the economies of scale are not working,” she said. “We’ve got Central Purchasing downtown sending us catalogues with Dr. Seuss books listed for $12 that you can buy at Crown Books for $6.

“The bottom line is mismanagement. Does the district manage its money well? Obviously not, or they wouldn’t have discovered $32 million sitting around in unused (desegregation) money since 1991 while they’re crying about not being able to afford the teachers’ contract. There are so many instances like this that there’s just a total lack of confidence in the district’s management.”

Smaller districts would have fewer layers of bureaucracy to “lose” money and a less complicated system of accounting for it, Reiss said.

For many, the district’s massive bureaucracy has come to symbolize everything wrong with the beleaguered school system, with its apparent ineptitude, foot-dragging and preoccupation with the myriad rules and regulations governing its 650 campuses.

“There’s so much we’d like to get rid of: all the rules and the regulations and the kind of petty nonsense you have to put up with to accomplish the simplest things,” said Hamilton High’s Rosen, an activist in her children’s schools for 10 years.

Rosen was one of 18 parents, teachers and community residents who searched for months last fall for a principal to replace the campus’s departing Jim Berk. “We put in 100 hours of our time, as volunteers, to search for a principal,” Rosen said. “We found the person we wanted and she agreed to take the job.”

Then, district officials stepped in and refused to offer their candidate, Nina Russo, a principal’s salary because the years she had spent in administration were not in Los Angeles Unified schools, Rosen said.

“They said she could have the job, but she’d have to take a $13,000 pay cut, meaning she’d make less than some assistant principals,” Rosen said. Russo accepted the pay cut. “There was so much anger on our part because of what the district did and the way they handled things.

“That’s when some of us said: ‘Who needs this? This district ought to be broken up.’ It seems like the only thing they know how to do is get in the way.”

For some, it seems plain common sense that the sheer size of the district mitigates against its ability to provide quality education.

“I’ve never talked to anybody who doesn’t think it’s too big,” Rosen said. “How can the seven people on the school board control a district this large with such diverse needs?”

At its core, the breakup campaign is rooted in that reality: A district that spans 700 miles, serves 640,000 children who hail from more than 100 nations and is perpetually starved for money cannot be all things to all people.

The effort by district officials to ensure equity--to deliver privilege and sacrifice evenly across the sprawling system--has led to hard feelings, anger and a sense of frustration among many parents, who fear that their children are getting the short end of the stick.

“Equity is a real good concept when you’re talking about everybody being equally good,” Reiss said. “But it’s a much more difficult concept to accept when you’re talking about the lowest common denominator and everybody getting the same bad deal.”

It was the notion of equity that drove the school board two years ago to approve its controversial year-round calendar. The schedule was seen as a way to bring spacious suburban schools in line with crowded inner-city campuses, which had been forced years earlier to sacrifice the traditional summer vacation to serve more students.

Valley parents lobbied against the year-round calendar, arguing that the area’s high summer temperatures made classrooms that were not air-conditioned unbearably hot.

“But the district insisted that everybody follow the same model, even if it made things worse in some areas,” Reiss said. “Nobody wants to have to suffer because someone around the corner has a problem and can’t come up to standards.”

The board this month reversed its year-round policy, voting to allow each high school complex--composed of a high school and its feeder campuses--to decide whether to return to the traditional September-to-June cycle. Reiss said the board’s reversal will only add more fuel to the breakup campaign.

“It’s just one more example of how this district is too large to be manageable,” she said. “You can’t make a single decision that’s wise for San Pedro to Chatsworth.”

Splitting the district would create less diverse districts. But some form of cross-town busing to bring minority students to schools in predominantly white areas of the Valley and the Westside would undoubtedly survive.

Nonetheless, proponents argue that the breakup would give the newly created suburban districts more control by allowing them to return bused-in students to their home districts if they violate school rules. Under current policy, problem students are often transferred to other nearby schools.

Although district statistics do not bear it out, there is strong sentiment among many parents and teachers in the Valley and on the Westside that students from the inner city--almost all of them minority--are responsible for the graffiti and violence that plague their campuses.

“There’s a perception in the Valley that . . . inner-city schools send us their worst students, and there are no harsh consequences for these bused-in kids when they misbehave,” said Jerome Robinson, an English teacher at Granada Hills High. “If they broke up the district, as soon as a kid breaks the rules, we could say: ‘He’s out. He’s not a Valley problem anymore.’ ”

That argument has attracted support for the breakup movement from some suburban parents and teachers, who see in it an opportunity to insulate themselves from urban problems.

“A lot of the kids that get bused out here are gang members, and they bring all that with them,” Robinson said. “We cannot solve the gang problem in L.A. That’s a problem for L.A. to solve, not send to us to solve.”

But it has also been a lightning rod for opposition, particularly among African-American and Latino community leaders, who say the breakup campaign exploits racism and fosters divisions in an already fragile city.

“The breakup of the district, to many Valley voters and conservative voters, means: ‘Let’s divest ourselves of problem children,’ which means poor and disadvantaged children,” said Joe Hicks, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jeff Horton, one of five school board members who oppose the breakup, said: “You cannot ignore the racial angle in all this. It is an issue. It’s the arrival of urban problems at suburban schools” that has drawn many parents to the breakup campaign.

But Reiss contends that most breakup supporters are motivated only by a desire to have more influence over their children’s education.

“Those of us in the Valley don’t presume to have the answers for communities that are so remote from ours, but neither are we out to disenfranchise anybody,” she said. “What we’re after is putting the control of local education back in local neighborhoods, so the specific needs of kids in every neighborhood can be better attended to.”

About This Series

This series examines the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District:

* Sunday: Political flip-flops and sea changes in the district’s makeup shaped the tangled history of attempts to split up the district.

* Today: Peeling paint and hot classrooms are among the problems that have made some parents favor a breakup.

* Tuesday: Remembering desegregation and other tough battles, many blacks and Latinos are suspicious of the movement to dismantle the school system.

* Wednesday: Experts tackle the question of whether smaller districts provide better educations than large ones.

THE TIMES POLL: Breaking Up the L.A. School District

A recent Times poll asked respondents their opinions of restructuring the Los Angeles Unified School District, including breaking it up into several independent districts. The results showed some noticeable differences by region of the city and by ethnic and racial group.

There is a proposal to break up the school district into many smaller, independent districts. Do you think that would be effective in improving the quality of education, or not?

All San Fer. Voters Anglo Black Latino Westside Valley * Effective 54 65 35 53 65 58 * Not effective 36 26 55 37 24 31 * Don’t know 10 9 10 10 11 11

Central South L.A. L.A. * Effective 44 56 * Not effective 45 37 * Don’t know 11 7

*

Some San Fernando Valley residents want to break away from L.A. Unified to form their own district. Supporters of the plan say L.A. Unified is too large and unresponsive to the needs of students in the Valley. Opponents say that a Valley district would still be too large to manage and that the breakup would harm minority students left in the rest of the district. Do you support or oppose the idea of Valley schools breaking away to form an independent school district?

All San Fer. Central Voters Anglo Black Latino Westside Valley L.A. * Support 48 63 28 35 62 59 41 * Oppose 37 24 60 48 27 26 40 * Don’t know 15 13 12 17 11 15 19

South L.A. * Support 39 * Oppose 52 * Don’t know 9

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There is a proposal to move toward so-called school-based management, which would involve giving individual schools greater control over school budgets, discipline and curriculum. Do you think that would be effective in improving the quality of education in the district, or not?

All San Fer. Voters Anglo Black Latino Westside Valley * Effective 70 77 59 66 74 73 * Not effective 21 17 31 22 19 17 * Don’t know 9 6 10 12 7 10

Central South L.A. L.A. * Effective 66 69 * Not effective 24 24 * Don’t know 10 7

NOTE: The Times Poll, conducted Jan. 28-Feb. 2, 1993, interviewed 1,618 Los Angeles adults by telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, although for some subgroups it may be somewhat higher.