City Council Approves Final Redistricting Map for LAUSD

The Los Angeles City Council approved a final Redistricting map for the Los Angeles Unified School District Wednesday, retaining the current configurations of District 5 in keeping with what Board of Education Member Bennett Kayser had been pushing for.

“Attorneys for the City of Los Angeles and the Chief Legislative Analyst stepped in and sought to make corrective changes to a tremendously flawed map,” Sarah Bradshaw, Kayser’s chief of staff, told Patch in an e-mail communiqué.

“It’s done, it’s done!” Bradshaw quoted Kayser as saying in response to the process that essentially returned to him the same district from which he won an election to the LAUSD board nine months ago, representing a vast area that includes Northeast L.A. and East L.A. “After all the drama and trauma … all I can say is it’s great to be back and I am thrilled for the chance to continue serving the very people who have placed their trust in me.”

Council Member Tom LaBonge had expressed particular concern about the separation of Marshall High School from District 5 in the Redistricting Commission’s proposed map, Bradshaw noted, adding: “It was the LaBonge map amendment that got the ball rolling toward a more parent-friendly final map than the one rushed through by the Redistricting Commission.”

The City Council voted 9-2 for the new map, with Council members Bernard Parks and Jan Perry voting against the changes. A final Council vote on the map is expected in June, when the new boundaries will be implemented.

Just last Thursday, in a speech before the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, Kayser lamented that the Redistricting Commission’s proposed map split off whole communities, cutting Atwater Village and Los Feliz in half and separating Griffith Park entirely from District 5. The proposed boundaries ran counter to a charter reform committee that he chaired about a dozen years ago while helping rewrite the Constitution of Los Angeles, Kayser told the Neighborhood Council.

See the attached PDF for an idea of what the final Redistricting map looks like; a second PDF offers some background into the fraught process over the past several months that eventually resulted in Wednesday's decision by the City Council.