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Mayor Outlines Plan to Take Over LAUSD

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

LOS ANGELES, April 19, 2006 -- L.A Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will hold a news conference today to discuss expanding children's programs. This comes just one day after the Mayor's State of the City Address last night.

Saying voters must be able to hold one person accountable, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called on the state Legislature to strip the Los Angeles Unified School District of most of its power and hand it over to his office.

"Voters need to be able to hire and fire one person accountable to parents, teachers and taxpayers," the mayor said in a State of the City speech delivered Tuesday at a South Los Angeles school.

"Unless we face the crisis in our schools, we will never truly hold ourselves to account," Villaraigosa said. "We can't be a great global city if we lose half of our work force before they graduate from high school."

His remarks, the centerpiece of his first State of the City speech, represent Villaraigosa's most detailed statements to date about his plan to wrest control of the schools from the Board of Education. The proposal is loosely modeled on mayoral takeovers in Chicago, Boston and New York City.

Although anchored to Los Angeles, the sprawling district covers all or part of more than two dozen smaller suburban cities. With nearly 730,000 students, it is the nation's second-largest, behind New York City's.

Critics call the mayor's proposal a power grab, and it has strained his relationships with district officials and the teachers union. Villaraigosa himself has said he expects his proposal will result in a political war over control of Los Angeles schools.

Superintendent Roy Romer disputed the mayor's claims that the school board is unaccountable. Board members, he said, think a mayoral takeover "isn't a good idea."

If enacted, the complex plan would upend a school system Villaraigosa blames for low test scores and a high dropout rate.

Mayoral aides said Villaraigosa plans to unveil proposed state legislation within weeks. It wasn't immediately clear if voters would ultimately have to sign off on any changes the Legislature might make. Under Villaraigosa's proposal, the Legislature would have to review the changes after six years and vote on whether to reauthorize them.

Villaraigosa said his proposal would create a council of mayors from cities within the district that would oversee the schools. As leader of the largest city, Los Angeles' mayor would have the most clout.

The school superintendent would be appointed by the mayoral council and would be in charge of the district's day-to-day operations. The elected school board would remain, but in a greatly diminished role.

Villaraigosa said Tuesday the board would become a point of contact for parents, reviewing complaints, overseeing student discipline and handling student transfer matters.

The mayor also said he wants to lengthen the school day and year, shift more funding from administration to classrooms and require students to wear uniforms.

The first-term mayor has made a takeover of the Los Angeles Unified School District one of his top priorities, arguing that the future of the city depends on improving student achievement. But until Tuesday he had provided few details of how he would take control of the district's elected school board or how a district under his control would operate.

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