State Backs School District
Secession Bid
Panel OKs a local vote on a neighborhood's proposal to split from
Centinela Valley.
By Jean Merl, Times Staff Writer - September 10, 2004
The state Board of Education handed a key victory to leaders in a small
South Bay elementary school district Thursday by authorizing a local vote
on their effort to split from the Centinela Valley Union High School
District.
The board's vote, unanimous except for one abstention, gives voters in the
2,000-student Wiseburn School District, just south of Los Angeles
International Airport, the final say in whether to add a high school to
their strong-performing system, which spans kindergarten through eighth
grade.
"This means we can provide our children with a better
opportunity," John R. Peterson, one of the leaders of the secession
campaign, said shortly after the board's vote.
The election will be held in March, and, if voters approve the measure,
officials expect to open a high school for Wiseburn no later than fall,
2006. Officials said they could start with a campus currently leased to a
youth soccer organization and decide later whether to build a facility.
The racially diverse district includes the Holly Glen neighborhood in
western Hawthorne and the unincorporated communities of Del Aire and
Wiseburn.
The vote disappointed Centinela Valley officials, who had argued that
residents of the entire high school district, not just the Wiseburn
portion, should be allowed to cast ballots. The high school district is
made up of three other elementary systems in addition to Wiseburn —
Hawthorne, Lawndale and Lennox.
"I'm very discouraged," Centinela Valley Supt. Cheryl M. White
said, noting that Wiseburn provides a large chunk of the tax base for the
entire high school district. Its departure would slice deeply into the
remaining district's ability to pass bond measures for repairing campuses
and building schools.
Wiseburn leaders said they were tired of waiting for major achievement
gains in the 7,500-student Centinela Valley district, which, though
improving, still lags state and county averages on the California testing
system. Wiseburn's four small schools test well above the average.
Both sides sent contingents to Sacramento to argue their positions at
Thursday's meeting. In the end, the board followed the Department of
Education staff's recommendation to allow the election and to limit it to
Wiseburn voters.
A crucial factor in limiting the voting to within the Wiseburn district
was the secession leaders' promise that their district's property owners
would continue paying their share of a $59-million bond measure passed in
2000, even though the newly reconfigured district would take none of the
schools or other buildings belonging to Centinela Valley.
Both sides agree that limiting the election to Wiseburn district voters
strongly enhances the proposal's chances at the ballot box. But getting an
election, even one with favorably drawn boundaries, does not guarantee
success.
In the South Bay city of Carson, backers of a drive to secede from the
sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District won state permission for a
local vote. But, underfunded and poorly organized, they saw their measure
trounced in November 2001 when United Teachers Los Angeles bankrolled a
well-run campaign against it.
In the Wiseburn case, the high school district's teachers are expected to
fight the split, while Wiseburn teachers are in favor of it.
For Peterson and other leaders in the secession drive, Thursday's vote
marked one of the final hurdles in a three-year campaign to bring the
issue to voters.
"It took a lot of time away from my marriage and my kids,"
Peterson said as he and other leaders prepared to take some Wiseburn
students on a post-vote tour of the Capitol. "I'm just grateful my
wife has been so supportive — and that I'm still married to her." |
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