Schools Struggle to Adjust Funding

In a bungalow at a Southeast Los Angeles school last week, Principal Carol Heard searched for ways to spend more money--usually an enviable task for a public school administrator--and came up short.

“I think we’ve done as much as we can do,” the Nueva Vista School principal said, sighing. “This is very difficult for us.”

In a rush to comply with a funding equity agreement that takes effect next year, Heard and hundreds of other principals in the Los Angeles Unified School District are scrambling to revise their spending practices. Some have been ordered to spend more on such things as teacher salaries and supplies, others to spend less.

In Heard’s case, she knows she must hire more experienced--and more expensive--teachers. But that demand collides head-on with her need to find bilingual teachers--three-quarters of her students do not speak English--most of whom are neophytes.

Dilemmas like Heard’s are fueling doubt these days about whether the district will meet a July 1997 deadline for complying with the funding pact known as the Rodriguez Consent Decree, which settled a lawsuit brought several years ago by minority parents concerned that their children’s schools had been shortchanged.

The decree requires each school to spend approximately the same per student from the district’s general fund budget. Data presented in the lawsuit showed that the district has traditionally spent more per student on its suburban campuses, in part because they have more highly paid veteran teachers and their small campuses are more expensive to maintain.

But the agreement does not allow the district to force teachers to transfer, and district officials claim that gives them few options to quickly equalize spending.

“The method we’re using is attrition, and that’s a slow process,” said Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers. “With that process alone, we would not be able to come into compliance by the deadline.”

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Increasingly, as schools struggle to meet a looming staffing deadline for next fall, there are whispers about seeking a formal delay of the decree. And the teachers union, which opposed the original settlement, has renewed its push to kill the plan.

“Why put a Band-Aid on something that’s not working?” asked United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein. “Throw it out.”

Earlier this month the school board began a closed-door review of options for renegotiating the decree, ranging from a one-year postponement to blending Rodriguez’s per-pupil budgeting formula into the district’s LEARN reform effort.

The reassessment comes to a board with no vested interest in the decree: Only two current members were on the board that approved the settlement, and both of them voted against it.

Board President Mark Slavkin said that he opposed the decree-- as did board member Julie Korenstein--because it regulated too limited an area of funding.

The plan only evens out general fund spending, which is mostly for salaries, while ignoring supplemental state and federal funds intended to compensate for the potentially greater educational needs of poorer, minority children.

“My concern was that the consent decree looks at one narrow piece of the total picture,” Slavkin said. “A lot of my concerns and Julie’s and others’ have come true.”

The plaintiffs’ attorneys declined to speculate about their future response to requests for changes, although one--Lew Hollman, an attorney with San Fernando Valley Legal Services--said he would rather see specific problems solved as they occur than have the entire plan delayed.

“The plaintiffs aren’t amenable to just postponing things,” Hollman said. “If there were a particular proposal about a particular problem, we would consider an extension on that item alone.”

Hollman said he remains optimistic that the district will meet the original deadline because things have been “proceeding on a good pace.”

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Indeed, during the past two weeks, district officials paid personal visits to all 217 schools--a third of the district’s campuses--that are significantly out of compliance with the Rodriguez spending guidelines, to offer budgeting tips.

At the final meeting, held Friday in Maywood, Heard pleaded her case. She said when she lost three veteran teachers last year she was able to replace only one with a similarly compensated candidate, pushing her school’s spending further behind the decree’s target.

Heard’s experience is typical for inner-city schools, said district official Larry Carletta.

As their few senior teachers retire, those low-spending schools “are just going to get lower.”

Under the decree, the district’s general fund budget is divided by the total number of students, and that portion is multiplied by a school’s enrollment, so that each gets a fair share. The settlement allows schools to hover within $100 above or below the per-student amount, which currently is nearly $1,500 annually.

Statistics show that progress toward compliance has been slow but steady. Since the district embarked on the decree, the number of schools above the spending limit has declined by more than 10%, to about 135 this year, and the portion below the allowable range shrank by nearly 20%, to 82 schools.

If the schools below the cutoff, like Heard’s, can prove they are trying to meet the spending goals, the decree allows them to receive the additional money to which they would be entitled and use it for staff enrichment, such as teacher training.

But that supplement will only exist if schools above the allowable range make enough cuts to free the money.

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Last week, as a possible stopgap measure, district finance officials recommended that the board fund a Rodriguez supplement of at least $4 million to support the “have-nots,” even if the “haves” do not meet their goals.

Meanwhile, other unanticipated implementation problems are proving vexing.

Some schools facing the specter of large cutbacks are actually the kind of low-achieving, low-income, predominantly minority schools that the decree was intended to help.

Among the many campuses facing reductions are Hollywood High, San Fernando Middle School and Elysian Heights Elementary.

That glitch is largely caused by Rodriguez’s attempt to bring more experienced teachers to the inner city by using a formula that tends to penalize schools that already have veteran staffs.

Nor does the decree’s per-student formula compensate for all of the additional costs of running year-round schools--which have been the district’s most common response to overcrowding in inner-city areas.

At the high school level, for instance, schools must offer access to core classes on all tracks even if those courses are not always full--which is both inefficient and expensive.

In a Feb. 5 letter to top district officials obtained by The Times, union President Bernstein issued a barely disguised “I told you so,” including a list of imperiled campuses, as part of the union’s demand for a moratorium on Rodriguez.

“The concerns that prompted UTLA to object to the decree in the first place have now become reality,” Bernstein wrote.

“Numerous schools with special needs because of size, socioeconomic background of students and / or location are now faced with losing resources that they sorely need in order to serve their students.”