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By KRISTINA SAUERWEIN
Beginning Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization will hold two public meetings in the San Fernando Valley on breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District and forming two independent systems here
The meetings will help the 11-member committee, an independent and elected body, [the LA School boards not the public] make a recommendation to the State Board of Education on whether to establish two 100,000-student school systems in the Valley.
Ultimately, the state board would decide whether to call an election. Ninety minutes will be allotted for public presentations, with 45 minutes each for proponents and opponents.
The breakup proposal, submitted to the education committee last month by Finally Restoring Excellence in Education, or FREE, calls for two 100,000-student school districts with a boundary roughly along Roscoe Boulevard. The Valley would be divided into northern and southern halves.
To begin the process of breaking up L.A. Unified, which has 711,000 students, FREE was required by state law to collect validated signatures from 8% of the residents who voted in the last gubernatorial election. A minimum of 20,808 signatures was needed. FREE collected 20,962. The county verified the petitions to ensure those who signed were registered voters.
County officials emphasized the hearings are for information-gathering and not referendums on the number of people for or against the proposal. Under state law, the committee is required to ensure the proposed districts will not cause any substantial increase in costs to the state nor promote racial or ethnic discrimination or segregation, among other factors.
Each speaker will be limited to five minutes or shorter. Speakers are also encouraged to arrive early to sign in. Those who need interpreters should call (562) 940-1645 at least three days before the meetings.
The 7 p.m. hearings will be Wednesday at San Fernando High School, 11133 O'Melveny Ave., San Fernando, and Feb. 24 at Birmingham High School, 17000 Haynes St., Van Nuys
By Dominic Berbeo, Staff Writer
PACOIMA -- In what could become a model for building Los Angeles public schools, charter school Principal Yvonne Chan announced a deal with Los Angeles Unified on Friday to use public funds and private donations to build a primary center.
Chan, principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, said her school will sign a memorandum of understanding with the district Monday that permits charter schools to use Proposition BB funds to secure private sector loans for school construction.
"The idea is to get the community involved by building schools with facilities for all residents, not just their children," Chan said. She made the announcement during a groundbreaking ceremony Friday for a $5.8 million primary center that will take advantage of the new district policy. The new school will replace a row of dilapidated houses that Vaughn bought across the street from its existing campus.
Scheduled to open in July 2001, the new primary center will feature 30 classrooms, a computer lab, library and literacy center, child care center, parent center and outdoor theater. The 600-student school will reserve 150 seats for children from surrounding elementary schools that are overcrowded.
Primary centers are small schools that serve children in kindergarten through third grade. They require less land than full-scale elementary schools and are cheaper and faster to build. The construction of Vaughn's new primary center comes as the Los Angeles Unified School District struggles to build 150 new schools to accommodate swelling numbers of students during the next five years.
Howard Miller, the district's chief operating officer, said Friday that the district can learn a lot from Vaughn's creative solution to overcrowding. "We are committed to the charter movement," Miller said. "This school is an example of what we can achieve when we empower principals."
Chan said the school was able to buy the land from local homeowners because the new primary center will serve the community as well as students. "When we have services for the public, we're more likely to have community support to sell us land," Chan said. "In this way we overcome the difficult task of finding new land for schools, which the district hasn't been able to do."
Raquel Madrid, a mother with children in kindergarten and second grade, said she is grateful for Chan's work. Like nearly half the families with children in Los Angeles public schools, Madrid's family has no health insurance. "The basic services and medicine they can give us and our children is fantastic," she said.
Plans call for the charter school to eventually expand to include middle school and high school students. When the primary center opens next year, the school's youngest pupils will be transferred there to make way for construction of a new high school to be called Panda Academy, a teacher training program for high school students.
We have got to show these politicians and bureaucrats, once and for all, we are not going to let them tax us out of our homes and businesses. Their theory of throwing good money after bad doesn't work. You can throw all the hay and grain you want at a dead horse and it still won't make it run. Likewise, you can throw all the money in the world at a bad teacher and the bureaucrats of a government school system and it still will not work.
Look at the Los Angeles Unified School District. They throw away $200 million on a temple to the administration and the school board, and what do they have to show for it? A $200 million toxic site. They hire an incompetent administrator and then fire him and what? They pay him over $800,000 to go away.
When these clowns streamline their systems and start teaching our children to read, write and how to survive in society, then and only then let them again come to us and ask for help.
Stop Prop. 26; it is bad for everyone. -- Vinton M. Lampton, Agua Dulce
By David R. Baker, Staff Writer
NORTH HOLLYWOOD -- Despite stiff community opposition, two San Fernando Valley schools could be forced to adopt year-round schedules to handle swelling enrollment, district officials said Wednesday.
School board members are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to switch North Hollywood High School and Sepulveda Middle School to year-round calendars, which would place students on alternating tracks. Many local schools, especially in the crowded East Valley, already have made the change during the past decade.
Parents at North Hollywood High School and district officials will discuss the plan at a campus meeting tonight. The proposal already has drawn fire from parents, who complain it would disrupt their schools and special programs, such as the magnet program for the highly gifted magnet at North Hollywood.
"We have so many different magnet programs over there -- different academies that interact together -- that for us to go year-round just wouldn't make any sense," said Teri Dates, president of North Hollywood's Parent Teacher Student Association. "Year-round is not the answer."
But some district officials say there is little choice. Both schools already bus out more than 100 students they can't accommodate on campus, and enrollment is growing. "You can come up with any creative idea you want, but the kids are still there, and they're coming in hordes," said school board member Julie Korenstein, who represents the Sepulveda Middle School neighborhood.
North Hollywood High earlier faced the possibility of switching to a year-round schedule, but alarmed parents and teachers managed to defeat the idea after a series of emotional protests. It popped up again late last year when the school district's new management team unveiled a plan to ease overcrowding on East Valley campuses by converting middle schools into high schools and building 11 small primary centers for pupils in kindergarten through third grade. As part of that proposal, the area's high schools would run year-round.
North Hollywood High is in board member Caprice Young's district, and she hopes to find some alternative to the multitrack calendar. She will introduce a motion Tuesday asking the board to let the school's staff find other ways to accommodate more students.
A workable alternative, however, won't come easily. Simply placing more portable classrooms on campus won't add enough seats to handle the 410 students already bused out, along with 150 to 200 additional students expected next year. "You can only put so many bungalows onto a campus," Young said.
Dates said North Hollywood High staff members are examining ways to change the school's daily schedule to let students arrive and leave at varied times. "They could come to school in waves," she said.
Such altered schedules are difficult, but not impossible, to work out, Assistant Superintendent Gordon Wohlers said. At issue is squeezing in the necessary minutes of instruction for all students without placing some on unpleasant daily schedules. "It causes you to start very early and end very late," Wohlers said.
Sepulveda Middle School also might have run out of options. District officials already carved up its attendance area, sending about 388 students to Holmes Middle School in Northridge instead. Still, 167 students are bused out of the Sepulveda Middle School neighborhood every day. Parents and district officials will discuss a proposal to place North Hollywood High School on a year-round schedule. The meeting will be held from 7 to 9 tonight in the auditorium at the school, 5231 Colfax Ave.
By David R. Baker, Staff Writer
With public hearings scheduled next month on breaking up the massive Los Angeles Unified School District, advocates of creating San Fernando Valley school districts expressed wide disagreement Wednesday on how to do it.
Finally Restoring Excellence in Education members want two Valley districts, one in the north, another in the south. Their successful petition drive forced the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization to set hearings for 7 p.m. Feb. 16 at San Fernando High School and 7 p.m. Feb. 24 at Birmingham High School.
But several Latino organizations interested in splitting the district say they will oppose FREE's plan at the hearings.
Others worry that the disagreement will derail breakup efforts just as they seemed to be gaining strength. "This is a double-edged sword," said state Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Van Nuys. The Northeast Valley legislator wants smaller school districts but has serious doubts about FREE's plan.
"If it passes, it may not be exactly what we wanted," he said. "If it doesn't pass, it could be perceived as a mandate to preserve LAUSD the way it is." A former assemblywoman who helped found FREE, Paula Boland, said she needs the support of everyone interested in breaking up the district, regardless of differences. "I want them in. I want everybody in," she said.
The hearings will be the first phase of a process that could lead to a public vote on breaking up the 711,000-student Los Angeles school district. FREE triggered the meetings by gathering 20,962 signatures on breakup petitions. After the hearings, the county committee must forward the petition to the California Board of Education, which will decide whether the issue goes on the ballot.
At the heart of the debate lies the shape of the proposed Valley districts. FREE's plan calls for cutting the Valley in two, with Roscoe Boulevard and Saticoy Street forming the border. FREE drew those boundaries to make sure both districts included white neighborhoods in the West Valley, as well as largely Latino communities in the east. State law forbids reorganizing a school district in any way that would segregate students along ethnic lines.
"The reorganization can't diminish minority protections," said FREE member Stephanie Carter. "We drew the best plan we could to meet those criteria. "But some Latino activists argue that a north-south divide would merely dilute the political power of Latino parents.
"We believe it would hurt the ability of the Latino community to elect members to the school board," said Alan Clayton, research chairman for the Los Angeles City-County Redistricting Coalition. "They've fragmented the voting strength of the Latino community."
Clayton offers his criticism with a note of regret. His organization does not officially back breaking up the LAUSD but is interested enough to have drawn up several alternative plans, one of which calls for splitting the Valley into eastern and western districts.
Although the coalition will argue against FREE's plan at the meetings, Clayton said the problem lies in the proposed boundaries, not in the basic idea. "I told Stephanie I just wish we had a talk before (FREE) drew it," he said about the petitioners' proposal for boundaries.
But those boundaries will be difficult, if not impossible, to change. They were included on the petitions FREE circulated. Boundaries are not among the details that state law allows to be changed in a district reorganization plan before it is submitted to voters, said Dan Reibson, a reorganization specialist for the California Department of Education.
"Once people have signed the petition, they sign it on the basis of those boundaries, and if you change them, that invalidates the petition," he said. Reibson added, however, that the matter may have to be decided by a court. "This will be lawyer country," he said.
As a result, FREE will enter the hearings next month with some potential supporters conspicuously on the fence. Even Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, the group that successfully pushed for a study of Valley secession, has yet to take an official position on FREE's proposal.
Valley VOTE has a committee exploring different ways to break up the school district and hasn't settled on any single proposal, said the organization's executive director, Jeff Brain. "Our committee is not at a point yet to take a position on a specific proposal," he said. Brain added, however, that he and others from Valley VOTE would attend the meetings as individuals to show their support.
"This is the only effort that has gotten this far," he said. "People who are interested in this issue should be there."
Boland said she hopes to win the support of all those interested in breaking up the district, even if the proposed new boundaries can't be changed. "Is it possible? No. Do we want to talk with them and continue to hear their concerns? Yes," she said.
