Speed Beats Need in State School Funding

At a time of enormous overcrowding in public schools across California, billions of dollars in state construction money has been distributed erratically in a process based on how quickly districts can build, rather than how badly they need the money.

As a result, California officials have handed out more than $6.8 billion in school construction funds over the last decade, yet have failed to deliver a single dollar to more than 100 of the state’s fastest-growing school districts, a Times analysis has found.

At schools in many of those districts, a thousand children are crammed into space intended for 500, lunch periods are staggered for crowd control and playgrounds have been gobbled up by bungalows.

During the same 10 years, many districts that had little growth, or had even lost enrollment, received $225 million for new schools, multipurpose centers and gymnasiums.

A Times analysis of school bond apportionments reveals a capricious system that produces great variations among districts because the state does not have a process for comparing the needs of different districts. Instead, it has dispensed funds to those that are quickest to obtain land and prepare construction plans.

That practice is particularly problematic because state funds have fallen so far short of what would be needed to keep up with rising school enrollments statewide.

In a fast-developing Santa Clarita Valley suburb, the Sulphur Springs Elementary School District has gotten no money and hasn’t built a new school since 1988 because of trouble acquiring land.

At Valley View Elementary, a year-round school, portable bungalows are lined up like barracks. The upper-grade bungalows, set down the hill on the athletic field, do not have running water. The office copier room has been converted into a classroom and students who are taking a class during their four-week break meet in a long room formerly used as a hallway.

“We’re just full,” said the school’s beleaguered plant manager, Dave Hill. “We are bursting at the seams.”

Somehow, teachers remain upbeat.

“It would be optimum if we had running water so when we do a project we wouldn’t have to carry water in a bucket,” fifth-grade teacher Betty Andersen said. “But you know what--we do just fine.”

Fifty miles away, in the southeastern corner of Los Angeles County, Downey Unified has seen enrollment increase 43% in the last decade. It needs at least two more schools for its 21,000 students, but it also has gotten no state funds. The district has been unable to apply for state help because it has not yet been able to acquire land.

The district’s Rio Hondo Elementary, in a post-World War II subdivision that is suddenly swelling with new families, was built for about 500 students. Today, 954 attend, taking lessons in portable classrooms that have multiplied across former playing fields.

The cafeteria is so small that Principal Dolores Goble has broken the lunch schedule into six shifts, one for each grade level. Even stretched out from 11:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., that leaves only 30 minutes per group.

“We really have to push them: ‘Eat! Eat! Eat!’ ” Goble said.

Meanwhile, the Indian Diggings Elementary School District, in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, received $538,000 to build a multipurpose room and kitchen. Enrollment in the district’s one school declined from 32 to 25 during the decade. Having met minimum eligibility standards, the Indian Diggings district moved quickly to get in line for the money.

The state does not keep track of how different districts fare in the competition for money or whether the funds are distributed equitably. To find that out, The Times analyzed 10 years of computer records on enrollment and school bond apportionments. The records show that bond money is distributed unevenly among districts, with no clear patterns. Winners and losers could be found in urban, suburban and rural areas, and in districts of all sizes.

The funds were distributed to 486 districts, slightly fewer than half the state’s 987. Funding varied widely--from $1.4 million per new student in Woodland Union Elementary District in Tulare County to $29 in Alameda County’s Piedmont Unified.

About 502 districts received no construction funds at all. Although most of those had little or no growth, 109 grew 30% or more.

In Los Angeles County, 10 districts got no money, despite having enrollment growth of 30% or more. Not all were hardship cases. A few didn’t need the money, some didn’t qualify and others simply chose not to apply.

But many were forced to rely on local taxes, borrow against operating funds, tap developers and sometimes plead for assistance from city governments to add new classrooms. When those measures fell short, they filled existing campuses with bungalows, converted schools to year-round calendars or put students on buses.

Contending that these hardships most often fall on children in urban school districts, a group of Los Angeles civil rights attorneys challenged the state’s distribution system in a lawsuit filed earlier this year. A judge, ruling in their favor, has ordered state officials to devise a fairer system.

To an extent, that’s an impossible job, simply because there is far too little money.

Since 1990, the state’s public school enrollment has risen by nearly 1.26 million students, an increase of about 27%. A coalition of school officials estimated before the 1998 bond that building new classrooms for all those children would cost at least $15 billion. Land costs would likely be that much again or more. Since the state pays about half the cost for new schools, its tab would run $15 billion, more than five times what it has spent since then.

Currently, only about $1.3 billion remains in the state bond fund.

“People need to realize that regardless of how we do this, there’s not going to be enough money to fund everybody,” said Fabian Nunez, director of legislative affairs for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “There are going to be more projects than money. What’s the most equitable way to distribute this money?”

Critics of the system say the lack of funds is precisely why the state should allocate money according to need. They challenge a system that gives a school in Shasta County bond money to build a multipurpose room when thousands of students in Los Angeles endure long bus rides because their neighborhood schools are overcrowded.

State officials acknowledge that the system has flaws. For many years, the board that allocates bond money operated with great discretion in deciding whether a project was worthy. That process was criticized as being too arbitrary. In the 1998 bond law, the Legislature curtailed that latitude, said Bruce Hancock, assistant executive director of the State Allocation Board. While the new rules changed the system, they failed to cure the mismatch between individual districts’ needs and the money they get.

“There was criticism that the board was politically motivated, made too many case-by-case decisions,” Hancock said. “[Now] everybody knows exactly and clearly what the rules are. But it also takes away the board’s ability to take a one-size-fits-all rule and tweak it, make it work in all the endless variations.”

One of the districts that has complained most loudly about the state’s allocation system is L. A. Unified. The district grew by 100,000 students during the 1990s--vastly more than any other district in the state. More than a third of L. A. Unified’s 550 regular campuses are on year-round calendars, and more are converting each year. The district will have to add 65,000 new seats in five years, just to have a place for every student.

Los Angeles officials hope to refashion the state’s rules so that the district can receive as much as two-thirds of the remaining bond money for its program to build about 100 schools. They argue that the district’s 722,000 students deserve the relief because they have borne the greatest share of neglect under the current system.

The superintendents of many small and medium-size districts counter that bureaucratic turmoil and inefficiency in Los Angeles is to blame for the district’s problems, and they are fighting to keep money available for their own projects.

While the policy debate has focused on Los Angeles, The Times analysis shows that L. A. Unified and many of the other large urban districts that have been portrayed as losers in the state’s system are actually not the worst off.

L. A. Unified fared much better than many other districts, both urban and suburban, by receiving $440 million during a decade when its 16.4% growth rate was lower than the state average. The district averaged $4,379 in state aid for each new student, moderately below the state average of $5,413. The district collected nearly all that money before the 1998 bond. Since then, it has qualified for very little money.

Many other large districts also received substantial sums of state money. Their problem is that the money simply falls far short of their even larger needs.

Anaheim Elementary, for example, received $42 million over the last 10 years to build new schools, but that wasn’t nearly enough to keep up with its 56% growth rate. The district runs all 12 of its schools on multitrack, year-round schedules. In the mid-1990s, when the state provided funds for all schools to reduce class sizes in the early grades, Anaheim began double sessions in kindergarten through third grade, with some students coming early in the morning and others staying until late afternoon. Facilities director Lettie Boggs estimates that it would cost $184 million just to eliminate the double sessions.

Anaheim’s multiple schedules don’t sit well with parents, including Mariellen Serrano, the PTA president at Westmont Elementary School. She has two children in year-round schools with vacations in May, September and January, and two in schools with the traditional three months off in summer.

“That makes family time, which is very important to us, difficult to schedule,” Serrano said. “You have to take someone out of school to go on vacation.”

To be eligible for new school construction money, a district must own land for the school, have plans approved by the state architect and show that it has students who are not adequately housed. That can include those on multitrack, in portables or anticipated as future enrollment.

The reasons for a district’s success or failure in capturing bond money often include the cost and availability of land and the effectiveness and stability of district leaders. A recurring theme is the boom-and-bust nature of funding caused by the two-year cycle of bond elections. During the 1990s, those bonds have been too small to maintain a steady flow of money. The defeat of a bond measure in 1994 caused an unusually long drought in the middle of the decade.

“The reality is that, if you get your project in line and get them up [to Sacramento], there’s money and then there’s not money, and there’s money again,” said Boggs, Anaheim’s facilities director.

The timing has never been right for the Burbank Unified School District. Early in the decade, it didn’t qualify for new construction funds because it had sufficient classroom space. By mid-decade, an influx of nearly 4,000 new students and class-size reductions pushed its schools beyond capacity. By then, however, there was no money. The district obtained $2 million from the city redevelopment agency to enlarge three elementary schools.

Facilities director Ali Kiafar now needs to expand two high schools. Burbank, like Sulphur Springs, is applying for its first state construction funds, but Kiafar is worried that changes in the rules may cut the district out again.

“Depending on the results of the lawsuit, there might be some negative impact on our district,” he said.

State officials, who until the recent judicial decision strongly defended their procedures, point out that not all the rapidly growing districts can demonstrate a clear need for funds.

Indeed, The Times found that some, particularly along the Southern California coast, were able to absorb new students by reopening campuses closed during earlier periods of declining enrollment. Others were able to meet their needs solely by tapping local bonds and developer fees.

In other cases, state officials acknowledged, many districts choose not to use the state program for reasons that include misunderstanding of the rules, distaste for the enormous paperwork, or unwillingness to work within conditions imposed by Sacramento.

“I think it’s a mistake,” Hancock said. “As a taxpayer, I would be pretty upset if I knew that my district was passing up state funding.”

In sharp contrast, other districts were eligible for bond money, even though they had no significant growth.

The Banning Unified School District, in the desert town near Palm Springs, has added a scant 123 students over the past decade. Its total enrollment of about 4,500 is smaller than that of some Los Angeles high schools.

Yet because eligibility takes into account such factors as potential future growth, as well as portables that exceed 25% of a school’s capacity, Banning is considered by the state to have 7,000 unhoused students. The district has collected $19 million from the state for a new high school and elementary school, now under construction.

Supt. Kathy McNamara makes no apologies.

“I think need comes in various packages,” she said. “For one district to say they’re more needy than another one is a little bit difficult to swallow.”

She defines need by reference to Cabazon Elementary, where two weary classroom buildings stand like a forlorn motel amid a patch of dust beside Interstate 10. Twice vehicles have come off the freeway onto the campus, McNamara said. And state officials have condemned one of the two buildings.

“It’s not a place that is conducive to kids,” she said.

In other districts, need is defined as a multipurpose room--center of campus life and sometimes of community social life.

Despite declining enrollments, Shasta Union Elementary School in Northern California and Julian Union Elementary School District in San Diego County were among the dozens of districts awarded funds to build new multipurpose rooms.

Galt Union High School District, which operates a single school in a farm town near Sacramento, has grown more than 40% during the decade, but didn’t use its $4.7 million in state construction funds to address crowding. Nearly three-fourths of Galt’s students attend class in a warren of portables stacked at the back of the 1911 campus. But, because of community interest, the district built a new cafeteria and gym instead of classrooms.

Those kinds of projects fill officials in Los Angeles and other crowded urban districts with envy and outrage. For them, every multipurpose room in a rural district means more urban kids on year-round schedules.

State law allows bond funds to be used for projects that are not strictly related to classroom crowding. The policy was intended to give districts more discretion and to get the state out of local decisions, Hancock said.

But now state officials are concerned about the prevalence of that practice and are considering setting limits.

“It’s a difficult issue,” he said. “Districts will argue with us that there are no sources of funding to build these other facilities.”

Advocates for the Los Angeles schools consider expenditure of state money for such facilities unjustifiable when put up against their needs.

In deliberations that are being intensely watched and lobbied by hundreds of school districts, state officials are trying to craft a new formula that would allocate bond funds according to each district’s need.

Their challenge will be to find a formula that takes better care of large urban districts, particularly Los Angeles Unified, without completely trampling the hundreds of small and medium-size districts such as Sulphur Springs and Downey.

If either side feels cheated by the new system, it could affect the state’s ability to pass future bond measures.

Nunez, L. A. Unified’s director of government affairs, said he is sympathetic with those districts and is trying to get state legislators to focus on the underlying problem of money.

He has a proposal he believes would provide a solution for all. The Legislature, he said, could shift some of the state’s huge surplus to school construction to carry through the next bond, expected to go on the ballot in 2002.

“This is a real crisis that the Legislature needs to deal with,” Nunez said. “Do we have the political will?”

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Times staff writer Jessica Garrison contributed to this article.

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Winners and Losers

California’s school districts have not shared evenly in the $6.8 billion the state has handed out over the last decade for new construction. Some districts with high enrollment growth received no state aid. Others had little or no growth but collected funds. Of 183 districts in five Southern California counties, 47 illustrate the discrepencies.

Source: California Office of Public School Construction; Data analysis by DOUG SMITH/Los Angeles Times