Secession Obsession : Let’s look before we leap into a Valley breakaway from L.A.

Throw away that day planner. Shelve those resolutions, and clear your calendar. Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) has our lives planned through the year 2000.

San Fernando Valley residents are supposed to create a new school district, or two, or three, or maybe a dozen, without destroying the provisions of the 14th Amendment. All of the new districts have to be markedly better than the still unified Los Angeles school district.

But Boland apparently expects Valley residents to build a municipal government at the same time.

This is great. Let’s roll the dice with perhaps a generation of young minds while we ignore the present school district and fiddle with the tantalizing tidbits of education demolition.

We have all of those newly formed and successful new school districts around the nation to look to for guidance. We just have to find them first.

We aren’t saying that a successfully dismantled district is impossible. We are saying thatit is sheer folly to consider a municipal separation from Los Angeles before it’s even determined that a separate school district is feasible.

Boland put through legislation that would make it easier to break up the school district. But now, we have the recent submission of a bill that would make it easier for the Valley to break away from Los Angeles, period.

Sure, the Valley has long viewed itself as the unappreciated engine of the city. Still, keep in mind that a secession of this magnitude has not happened in California since 1907.

Focusing on secession now would just leave less time for such pressing problems as the funding needs of the LAPD, economic development, a mass transit system that works. There will be less time to monitor the politicians who were elected to make this city work.

Dismantling government is not the solution. The need is for local areas to work together to solve their interrelated problems.