Committee OKs Hayden’s School Bill : Education: Appropriations panel gives bipartisan support to one of two measures dealing with possible breakup of massive L.A. district.

Convinced its costs would be minimal, a state Senate committee on Monday approved half of a two-bill package to give voters a voice in whether to chop up the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, charged with looking out for the state’s bottom line, gave bipartisan support to a bill by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica). Committee members sent the measure to the Senate floor with a 10-0 vote.

The bill would extend current court orders mandating desegregation and funding equities to any new districts formed in the event voters decide to parcel off the massive Los Angeles Unified district.

For 20 years, parent advocates in the San Fernando Valley have tried to light a fire under a movement to break up the district, which--with 640,000 students--is the nation’s second largest.

Supporters argue that the district is too big to operate efficiently--or to do a good job of teaching children.

Hayden’s bill is twinned with a proposal by Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) to make it easier to place a breakup question on the ballot. The Boland bill would lower the signature threshold from 25% of all registered voters in the district to 8% of those in the district who voted in the last gubernatorial election. It would also strip the LAUSD of the veto power it currently enjoys, which enables it to scuttle a breakup even if voters call for a change.

Hayden said Boland’s role in rounding up Republican votes on the Senate panel was key to the bill’s passage.

Instead of shelving the proposal to force it to compete with other legislators’ pet projects for a shrinking piece of the state budget pie, senators accepted Hayden’s word that its cost was small.

Senate staff consultants said the price tag could exceed $150,000, but Hayden disputed that estimate, saying all his bill calls for is a monitoring of the guidelines it sets up.

“It reflects a lot of working together among the warring parties for something that is acceptable and allows the citizens the right to form a new district, if they choose,” Hayden said.

Los Angeles schools representative Ron Prescott said he thought the bill, if anything, was a money-saver because it would present clear guidelines from the start and avoid expensive legal showdowns should a breakup become reality.

As well, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance said it did not have objections over the bill’s cost.

Hayden says he is optimistic that, having come this far, his bill will get a favorable vote on the Senate floor.

If it clears the Senate, it will advance to the Assembly, where it will face opposition by Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), who has long voiced questions over whether racial segregation might be the unwelcome byproduct of an LAUSD breakup.

In the Assembly, Boland’s bill still awaits action by the lower house’s appropriations committee.