Wiseburn School District

The Wiseburn Unified School District is a school district in Los Angeles County, California operating elementary and middle schools. Its headquarters are in Hawthorne, California.

It was established in 1896. In 1912 the El Segundo School District opened, taking territory from Wiseburn.

There was a movement for the Wiseburn district to secede from the Centinela Valley Union High School District which began as a signature collection drive around 2001. In 2002 the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization recommend ed that the vote to secede go forward but that the entire Centinela Valley area, and not just Wiseburn, vote on the secession issue. Wiseburn alone had 6,400 registered voters living in its boundaries while the entirety of Centinela Valley had 54,000 registered voters. Sandra Murillo of the Los Angeles Times stated that having the entire Centinela district vote on the matter would make it less likely to pass. The leadership of the Centinela Valley district was in favor of the entire district voting on the matter. In 2004 all board members of the California Board of Education except for one, who abstained, voted to declare that the vote on whether Wiseburn may secede should only be decided within Wiseburn's boundaries. An election was scheduled for March 8, 2005, but in December 2004, David Yaffe, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, granted a request from the Centinela district for a preliminary injunction, putting an on the election.

On November 5, 2013, 92.63% of the district's voters participating in the election favored the establishment of Wiseburn as a unified school district, permitting it to establish a high school.

The district has a territory of about 4 square miles (10 km²). The district serves Hollyglen, located in western Hawthorne, and Del Aire and Wiseburn,unincorporated areas south of Los Angeles International Airport. About 50% of the district is located in the city of El Segundo.

As of 2004 the district receives large amounts of property taxes from aerospace and high technology industries in eastern El Segundo. This area has no residential population. As of 2014^[update] the companies in that area include AIG,Boeing, Mattel, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Xerox. With the money from the area, the Wiseburn district had rebuilt all four of its schools in the 2000s. The Wiseburn district as a whole, as of 2002, generates about 40% of the assessed property value of the entire Centinela Valley district. Jean Merl of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2004 that Wiseburn "provides by far the largest portion of [the Centinela Valley Union High School District]'s assessed property tax valuation." The companies contributed about 80% of the Wiseburn district's $87 million 2010 school bond.

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