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Neediest Students Would Be Hurt, Education Officials Say : Rulings Seen as Pinching School Budgets

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Times Staff Writers

The Supreme Court rulings barring public school teachers from working on the grounds of parochial schools will strain already pinched school budgets and hurt programs for the nation’s neediest students, education officials warned Monday.

Education Secretary William J. Bennett, in a bluntly worded statement, declared: “Today’s Supreme Court decision, clearly reflecting a hostility toward religion, has made it vastly more difficult to provide education services to some of America’s neediest schoolchildren. This is terrible.”

A Victory for Principle

But representatives of the nation’s largest teachers’ organizations hailed the decisions as victories for the principle of the separation of church and state. Moreover, they suggested that they might be able to lure some inner-city children back into public schools to take remedial education courses that will no longer be available in church-sponsored institutions.

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The court struck down programs in New York and Michigan that allowed public school teachers to conduct classes and other activities in private schools, using federal funds earmarked for enhancing school programs for poverty-stricken students.

A total of 183,000 students in private schools nationwide--including some in California--benefit from such programs, the Education Department said.

Key Compromise

Placing public school teachers in parochial schools was the key compromise that permitted former President Lyndon B. Johnson to enact the first large-scale federal aid to education program. Under the program, federal funds are sent to public school districts, which are then required to provide instruction on an equal basis for impoverished children in both public and parochial schools.

Typically, remedial reading and mathematics teachers employed by a public school district are assigned to tutor children in parochial schools in low-income neighborhoods.

But the ruling could deprive many impoverished students of the opportunity for remedial education, said Milton Bins, an officer of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, a lobbying group representing the nation’s 35 largest school districts.

Bins, saying school districts “are stretched to the limit,” predicted that school officials would ask Congress to increase federal aid to cover the added costs of transporting private school students to public schools, so they could continue to take the same remedial courses affected by the court’s decision.

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Msgr. John Mihan, superintendent of elementary education for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said that “low achievers” in 85 Catholic schools in Los Angeles County receive tutoring from public school teachers who are paid with federal funds. Most of those children live in low-income areas in East or South-Central Los Angeles, he said.

“It is going to require the public school people to come up with some sort of imaginative solution to get around this, like offering the instruction at a neutral site or in a mobile unit,” Mihan said. “Of course, that will be more costly.”

But Lyle Hamilton, spokesman for the 1.7-million-member National Education Assn., said that the nation’s largest teachers’ organization is “pleased” with the decision.

“Obviously, it is not a happy situation for those children (in the affected classes) but what the NEA comes down on is the principle that public money should be spent on public schools,” Hamilton said. “It certainly would be nice if they could get those classes, but in public schools.”

A top representative of another group, the 600,000-member American Federation of Teachers, which primarily represents teachers in large urban public school districts, predicted that the rulings would lead some parents to pull their children out of private schools and enroll them in public schools.

“You will see more parents wanting to see their children in public settings,” said Scott Widmeyer, the union’s director of public relations. “We want to make it clear to parents that we stand ready to serve them and that the public schools are doing their job.”

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Bob Secter reported from Washington and David G. Savage from Los Angeles.

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