Driven to Succeed : U.S. High Court Ruling on Remedial Education Challenges the Resources of Local Boards

When a certain yellow school bus throws open its doors each morning outside St. Bernard’s School in Bellflower, no one gets out. Instead, teacher LuAnn Moore climbs in.

“All my assignments within the Bellflower School District have been rather different,” the 34-year-old Moore said laughingly recently as she decorated her “classroom,” putting a red Christmas pillow on the driver’s seat.

The 29-year-old yellow bus, its seats replaced by desks and chairs, is one school district’s resourceful way of complying with a United States Supreme Court ruling last summer that forbade public school teachers from providing federally funded remedial math and reading classes in religiously affiliated schools.

The 1965 federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided for special education for children from low-income areas, regardless of what schools they attended. California school districts received the funds and in turn commonly sent teachers or aides to the children.

Last July’s Supreme Court ruling upheld the federal law and required that aid to disadvantaged students be given on “an equitable basis” in both public and private schools. The court also said, however, that the practice of sending public tutors into parochial schools “unduly entangles government in matters religious.”

Many California school districts are still wrestling with how to comply with decision, and thousands of students have gone without the special tutoring.

“It was an idea born out of desperation,” Paula Curtiss, Bellflower Unified’s coordinator of special projects, said of the bus. A plan to transport the 28 children at St. Bernard’s who qualify for special instruction to area public schools was rejected by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials as too time-consuming, she said, and a proposal to use computer terminals proved “prohibitive as far as cost.”

“I was very frustrated,” Curtiss said. “Then I was returning a district car to the motor pool, and I saw this whole yard full of buses. I thought, ‘I wonder if . . . .’ ”

District transportation personnel showed her the 1956 Crown bus, which had carried Bellflower children more than 100,000 miles and which was no longer being used. About $3,000 later, the seats were out, the inside was repainted and surplus school furniture was bolted inside.

A school district driver delivers the portable classroom on Mondays and takes it back to a parking lot for the weekends to prevent vandalism.

“Separation of church and state” is followed to the letter by Moore, who noted, with a hint of irony, that she uses “district pencils, district paper, district supplies,” to teach the children.

The bus had been parked in the school parking lot, she added, but because a reporter and photographer were expected, school officials had ordered it moved onto the street. The curb-side parking place was not level, so Moore and the children had to stand and balance themselves or sit at an angle.

“We tease back and forth,” Sister Jane DeLisle, principal of St. Bernard’s, said of the court’s prohibition against using church property and the seriousness with which it is taken.

The district is looking into buying a space heater for cold days, for example, and a generator to operate it. They would not be able to hook up to St. Bernard’s electricity, Sister DeLisle said with a straight face: “They can’t use Catholic electricity.”

“Everybody’s been scrambling tremendously since that decision,” said Joseph Symkowick, chief legal counsel for the California Department of Education, adding that the problem is not only to quickly find an alternative way of teaching the children but also to provide service that is “equitable” to public school classes.

A survey is being taken by the state of the 220 school districts that provided the remedial classes last year in religiously affiliated schools, most of them Roman Catholic, to find out how many have found solutions to the problem. The children in such schools are a small proportion of the total number receiving the special tutoring, one state official said, comprising about 24,000 of 900,000.

Instruction Declines

Meanwhile, an official of the California Catholic Conference, representing the state’s 12 Roman Catholic dioceses, estimated that more than 20,000 children in Catholic schools received the instruction last year, compared to fewer than 5,000 now.

In Los Angeles, there were 11,777 Catholic children receiving remedial tutoring last year from Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, and none so far this year.

According to Pauline Hopper, assistant superintendent in charge of federal aid programs for the Los Angeles schools, a “variety of options” are still being explored.

“It’s like a nightmare,” she said. “We’ve been doing this program about 18 years, and to have it snuffed out in one decision. . . . The change is hard on all of us.”

Meanwhile, the district has set aside the $3 million that would have been spent, saving it until the problem is resolved.

Some other districts have found solutions. A Lynwood Unified School District official said that most of the parochial school children who qualified are attending tutorial programs before or after regular school hours at public school sites and that a tutorial program will be available next summer.

Community Center Used

The Santa Monica-Malibu School District installed a part-time teacher at the community center adjacent to the one parochial school in the area with eligible children.

The El Monte City, Vallelindo and Mountain View school districts in the El Monte area share a 20-foot mobile van that Mountain View already owned, said James DiPeso, a Mountain View official. The districts share the cost of two teachers and six aides who take the van to two parochial schools, serving 150 children.

Bellflower’s yellow bus has been popular with the children, Moore said. At recess, children not getting remedial help stop by and ask, “How can I go to this class?” she said.

Stephanie DaPra and Jennifer Pendergest, both 11, had climbed aboard and, after balancing themselves against the curb-side angle, walked to their wooden desks and sat down.

“I think it’s pretty neat,” Stephanie said of the bus.

“I think it’s odd,” Jennifer said.

They settled down to read a story called “The Real Ugly Ducking,” which was, their teacher noted, in a “district” book.