A lawsuit to topple Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to assume substantial control over the Los Angeles Unified School District is expected to ignite a court battle that will hinge on whether the state Legislature had the power to intervene on the mayor's behalf.
L.A. school officials said they would file a lawsuit within the next couple of weeks to strike down a law that the Legislature passed to pave the way for Villaraigosa's initiative. The California attorney general's office will defend the law, but the mayor also is arranging for a private lawyer to help protect his plan.
At the heart of the battle will be a 1946 amendment to Article IX, Section 6 of the state Constitution, which states: "No school or college or any other part of the public school system shall be, directly or indirectly, transferred from the public school system or placed under the jurisdiction of any authority other than one included within the public school system."
The state Constitution can be amended only by voters.
To get around the constitutional bar, the Legislature declared that a Council of Mayors, dominated by Villaraigosa and empowered to reject the school board's choice of a district superintendent, was a "local educational agency," making it part of the public school system specified in Article IX. A pivotal legal question the courts must answer is whether a body becomes an educational agency simply because the Legislature says it is.
"It's a close question that could go either way," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke University.
Chemerinsky said he believes the Legislature has the authority to decide what constitutes an educational agency and, therefore, Villaraigosa "probably has the better legal argument."
But no California court has ever ruled on the constitutional question of a partial mayoral takeover, and both sides pointed to peripheral rulings that bolstered their cases.
"It is reasonable that a court could say no, these are mayors, and you can't make a council of mayors an educational agency just by calling them one," said Chemerinsky, an expert on constitutional law and the Los Angeles City Charter.
Michael Hersher, deputy general counsel for the state Department of Education, said he also believes the mayor has the stronger case, although his boss, state schools chief Jack O'Connell, opposes the Los Angeles plan.
