Mayor to appeal LAUSD ruling

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa plans to appeal a ruling
that rejected his attempts to garner more control over part of Los
Angeles Unified School District to the state Supreme Court, his
office announced Monday.

In September 2006, the state legislature approved a measure that
would have given Villaraigosa control over three LAUSD high
schools, as well as the elementary and middle schools that feed
into them, starting in July 2007.

Increasing high school dropout rates, among other concerns with
student performance, led Villaraigosa to conclude that leaders
within the district were not being held accountable enough for
district improvement, the mayor has said.

“Voters need to be able to hire and fire one person
accountable to parents, teachers and taxpayers, a leader who is
ultimately responsible for systemwide performance,”
Villaraigosa said in April 2006 when he announced his intent to
take over the second-largest school district in the nation.

Had Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs not decided
the measure was a violation of the state constitution and Los
Angeles City Charter, the law would have gone into effect Jan. 1.
Under the law, Los Angeles would follow in the footsteps of Chicago
and New York, whose mayors also control those cities’ school
districts.

Though the mayor’s oversight of the district is still
uncertain, LAUSD is preparing for Villaraigosa’s potential
leadership position, said Lucy Okumu, director of external affairs
for LAUSD.

“We’ve talked with the mayor about what changes
would need to happen,” Okumu said. “But until we have
clarity from the courts, we remain in a planning stage.”

As part of the planning, Villaraigosa and LAUSD Superintendent
David Brewer have continued to conduct meetings on a weekly basis
to discuss reform within the district, in which approximately 30
percent of students drop out of high school.

Okumu said legislation was not necessary to establish a
partnership between the mayor and LAUSD.

She added that working on getting cleaner housing, safer
neighborhoods and better after-school programs in order to improve
the learning environment for LAUSD students “is work we can
do now.”

But the appeals process is now jeopardizing deadlines that had
been set earlier in the legislative process.

Brewer and the mayor had agreed to decide which schools would
make up the first “cluster” to be taken over by Feb. 1,
and the second cluster is set to be determined by March 1.

But Brewer has decided not to discuss which schools would be
taken over until the law is ruled constitutional.

Neither the superintendant nor the mayor’s office has
discussed changes to the deadlines yet.

Appeals to the state Supreme Court have been known to take more
than a year to resolve, but so far, Villaraigosa’s office
remains confident that his oversight of a portion of the district
will still begin in July 2007, said mayoral spokeswoman Janelle
Erickson.

Villaraigosa’s office is taking it as a good sign that the
District Court accepted the mayor’s request for an expedited
hearing within the next month, Erickson said.

“They recognize there’s an urgency to the case and
they are moving quickly,” she said. “It is our hope
that the state Supreme Court will also move in an expedited manner,
but it is hard to predict.”

She added that the mayor is more concerned with the state of the
school district than with the possibility of missing deadlines for
the initiative.

“The mayor is aggressively moving forward on his plans to
turn around some of our lowest-performing schools,” Erickson
said. “The mayor remains focused on the classroom, not the
courtroom.”

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