TARGETED AREAS

Educators on Friday gave a mixed report card to the plan to tinker with the state’s schools and universities.

The government streamlining panel’s recommendations to move up the cutoff date for kindergarten enrollment would save money but hurt children from immigrant families who do not speak English at home, said Jim Morris, an assistant superintendent for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“The sooner we have these kids in school, the sooner we can help them become academically prepared,” he said.

The state panel proposed making students wait a year to start kindergarten if they have not turned 5 by Sept. 1. The current cutoff date is Dec. 2.

Keeping 90,000 students from starting kindergarten would save about $660 million annually for the first two years and then $30 million a year, the panel said.

The commission cited research showing that students with summer and fall birthdates fall behind older classmates and are more likely to be held back. But Morris, who oversees elementary education, said Los Angeles schools find youngsters from poor families do better with an early start.

A commission proposal for the other end of public education won praise: eliminating fees for low-income students at UC and Cal State campuses, as community colleges already do. It is widely regarded as a simpler way to help those students than having them pay fees and apply for financial aid.

Such a change “could be a clear signal to more and more people in the state that education truly isn’t a function of how much money you have, and it might encourage more people to see [higher education] as an immediate possibility,” said Robert L. Moore, an education advisor to former Gov. Jerry Brown and until April the executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

The panel also proposed a requirement for everyone attending the state’s public universities and community colleges to perform community service.

Manolo P. Platin, chairman of the California State Student Assn., and a senior at Humboldt State, called it “an awesome move.”

“In a perfect world, we’d want everyone to want to do it, so you wouldn’t need to make it a mandatory thing,” he said.

But at the new Cal State Monterey Bay, the only state university or college with such a mandate, he said: “They’ve seen some amazing results from people who get involved in their communities who otherwise wouldn’t have, and it’s changed their whole lives.”

Facing sharper debate, however, was the idea of replacing the 58 county offices of education with 11 regional offices.

Many services that counties provide have been increasingly regionalized, said Glen Thomas, executive director of the California County Superintendents Educational Services Assn. But it would be unworkable to lump together the oversight that counties have over local districts, he said.

The L.A. County Office of Education, the largest in the state, monitors the finances of 94 school and community college districts and provides such services as juvenile court schools and special education for 60 districts.

Some experts also were critical of the plan to fold the California Community College Chancellor’s Office into a new Higher Education Division and drop the board overseeing the 72 college districts. They contend community colleges warrant an independent system.