The rumble over the public school giveaway plan Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa asked for is set for 11 a.m. Tuesday at the downtown Board of Education building and thousands of people on both sides are gearing up to duke it out over issues which some folks see as racist, elitist and certainly divisive.

The fight at Tuesday’s school board meeting has two cards: The first one is a debate on the resolution board members Marguerite LaMotte and Steven Zimmer submitted calling for access and equity for all students in the school district. That motion resulted from public outrage generated by the “Spanish-speaking only” summer school program held at John Ritter Elementary School in Watts last month.

Ritter is one of 10 schools being operated by Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles organization that were set aside from the LAUSD system and given to the mayor and his people to operate apparently as they see fit, up to and including implementing programs designed only for Spanish-speaking students, to the exclusion of those public school children who cannot speak Spanish.

I have heard school district officials say that since the funds to operate Ritter’s month-long Spanish-only class were provided by a separate source, such a thing was perfectly permissible.

“That’s absolutely wrong,” said LaMotte, the lone Black member of the board. “I’ve heard that too. That violates all the civil rights laws in the country.”

If passed Tuesday, LaMotte’s resolution would affirm and make it a policy that a statement of agreement to abide by same access and non-discriminatory standards be written into all memoranda of understanding and signed by all parties before any LAUSD school is given away, connected to or associated with any “partnership” arrangement — like the mayor’s — or joint venture involving public school children.

The resolution was originally co-authored by board member Richard Vladovic, but LaMotte said he recently removed his name from the document when she refused to “gut the resolution and render it weak and useless.”

The passage of the resolution leads to the second card in Tuesday’s fight and the issue over which Villaraigosa declared last week “Let’s get ready to rumble!” It’s board member Yolie Flores Aguilar’s resolution to turn over 50 new schools to outside operators, including the mayor, to operate as they see fit.

LaMotte said the issue of segregated education, as practiced at the mayor’s Ritter Elementary School, “needs to be rectified before anyone even thinks about handing off any more schools.” LaMotte pointed out that in previous years when the school district adopted its African-American Learning Initiative in an attempt to focus special attention to the educational needs of Black children, the board insisted that all references to “African-American” and “Black” be removed from the document and replaced with something more inclusive. “Back then we couldn’t say ‘African American’ but now it is perfectly fine to say ‘Spanish-speaking,’” LaMotte said. And I remember those days well.

Aguilar’s resolution, entitled “Public School Choice: A New Way at LAUSD,” is supported by the mayor and his band of merry people, such as the Alliance for a Better Community, the Boyle Heights Learning Collaborative, the East L.A. Education Collaborative, the Inner City Struggle, the Parent Revolution and the Southeast Cities Schools Coalition.

Groups opposed to the motion include all the labor unions, the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the California State Employees Association, ACORN, religious and ministerial groups, civil rights organizations and other neighborhood action groups.

The coalition of groups that opposes Aguilar’s motion has done to it what the board did to the African-American Learning Initiative — changed it, reworded it and made it more inclusive and less offensive to people who don’t speak Spanish and who don’t live on the Eastside. It’s the alternative resolution the opposition proposes to get passed Tuesday if one is to be passed at all.

The mayor appears to have commandeered city resources to make it easier for supporters of the Aguilar resolution to gather en masse at the school board at 11 a.m. Tuesday and demonstrate for its passage. Memos circulated in the LAUSD building since last week have alerted employees about first a 5,000-people, then later, a 1,000-people demonstration due at the Beaudry Avenue building from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday. A memo also states that the LAPD will be monitoring the event, that “50 to 60” buses will be bringing people to the demonstration and that the buses bringing them will be “staged” at Dodger Stadium. Humph.