S.D. May Become Test Case in Aid for Parochial Schools

Parked just a few yards from Our Lady’s School, a Catholic school in Golden Hill, the aging International Loadstar 1700 looked from afar like any ordinary school bus waiting to transport students on an educational field trip.

But the students who enter the bus every Monday through Thursday never go any farther than the curb. Once inside, they sit down for half-hour sessions of remedial reading and math in a mobile classroom outfitted with tables, blackboards, an electric generator and even the penmanship diagrams that add a touch of classroom to the 20-year-old vehicles.

The buses are the San Diego Unified School District’s response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on July 1 prohibiting public school teachers from offering remedial reading and math help inside religiously-affiliated school classrooms. The court reasoned that the practice entangled the government in religious matters.

This, however, left public school officials across the country in a bind because they are required by law to offer remedial education to private school students.

For the parochial school educators whose students use the mobile classrooms, San Diego’s buses may become a test case for their claim that school districts throughout California are violating federal law by offering 26,000 eligible students unequal remedial help or--in most cases--nothing at all.

At the request of the California Catholic Conference, the U.S. Department of Education is likely to choose San Diego as the nation’s first school district to face federal fact-finding hearings in an educational controversy that has pitted Catholic dioceses against public school districts across the country, a federal education official said.

“Kids attending private schools across the country are really being cheated,” said Richard Duffy, representative for federal assistance in the U.S. Catholic Conference’s education department. “In most areas, particularly major metropolitan areas, services are going undelivered.”

Unless San Diego city school officials resolve their dispute quickly with the Diocese of San Diego, the hearings could start next month.

“It just appears that they are at a stalemate” in San Diego, said Mary Jean LeTendre, director of compensatory education programs for the federal education department. In “other places they have continued to try, but (in) this place, it has just fallen apart.”

The Catholic Conference’s Feb. 7 complaint is the latest development in a clash that has sent school officials across the nation scrambling to come up with ways to comply with the Supreme Court ruling while still complying with federal laws requiring the remedial education.

In addition to the mobile classrooms, parochial school students are being tutored in temporary classrooms leased by public school systems and at “neutral sites” near Catholic schools--costly arrangements crafted to comply with the letter of the Supreme Court’s 5--4 decision in Aguilar v. Felton.

About 95% of the 200,000 U.S. private school students affected are in Catholic schools. Another 5 million public school students participate in the $3.7-billion program.

But in California and elsewhere across the nation, a major result of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling has been that many parochial school students receive no help. A California Department of Education survey showed that only 5,213 of the 26,322 students qualified for the assistance were receiving it as of Jan. 31, said Hanna Walker, a manager in the department’s compensatory education office.

A nationwide survey by LeTendre’s office revealed a huge drop in the number of students receiving the remedial help, from 198,000 last year to 111,000 this year, she said.

In San Diego, for example, public school tutors are working at only three of the 15 private schools they are required to serve, teaching just a fraction of the 1,243 students eligible for the reading and math services. Beginning today they will be at five schools.

The school district’s first bus did not roll until Dec. 13, costing the private school students more than three months of remedial help that won’t be made up unless the students attend summer school or receive extra help during the school year.

“We are out of compliance,” said R. Linden Courter, assistant director of the school district’s external funding department. “But there are also extenuating circumstances here.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 11,700 parochial school students are going without remedial help while school officials await a letter from LeTendre’s office allowing some of them back into portable classrooms where they were tutored for the past 17 years, said William Rubalcalva, supervisor of the district’s office of compliance.

State Department of Education officials have approved the use of the portables, leased by the public school district from the Archdiocese Welfare Corp., but lawyers have advised the district to make no moves until the federal government forwards its permission.

Penalties for other violations have totaled as much as $5 million, Rubalcalva said. “In the past, we have been burned badly . . . It does make the district gun-shy,” he said.

Even if the portables are approved, they will house only 5,000 parochial students. The remainder will still receive no help. The district is considering whether to purchase 25 to 30 mobile classrooms at a cost of $50,000 apiece, Rubalcalva said.

Other school districts across the country are slowly coming up with ways to slip out of the double bind created by the federal law and the Supreme Court ruling.

In Chicago, where about half the 4,800 eligible parochial school students are being tutored, public school teachers are still entering private schools while the public school districts move “with deliberate speed” to find alternatives, said Sister Cathy Campbell, spokeswoman for the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago. The plan was approved by the Illinois Department of Education.

New York City went to federal court and won a year’s delay in implementing the Supreme Court ruling. In Detroit, the public school system and the archdiocese agreed in January to a set of principles--known as “The Detroit Solution”--which calls for parochial school students to be tutored at neutral sites or in public school classrooms within walking distance of Catholic schools.

But in California, state Catholic Conference officials say too little is being done. “We contend that no services are flowing or that the services that are offered are inequitable,” said Joseph McElligott, director of the California Catholic Conference’s division of education.

“The district says, ‘Hey, we have an approved plan,’ and the state tells us that they do not have the adequate personnel to monitor the situation,” McElligott said.

Similar complaints have been registered from Catholic school leaders in cities such as Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Omaha, but they led to negotiated agreements, LeTendre said. In most of the other cases, “there has been more progress than we see in California, and the problem is not as pervasive,” she said.

“Equitable” is the key word in the dispute. Catholic school leaders say that San Diego’s buses are cramped and saddled with noisy generators and inadequate storage, making the remedial help received by parochial school students inherently unequal to the tutoring given in public school classrooms.

Parochial school principals complained this month that fumes from a generator sent a teacher home ill and that transients have tried to board buses parked outside the parochial schools.

“The fact is that they’ve established a program that we were skeptical about, that we warned them against,” said the Rev. Dennis Clark, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of San Diego. “They are spending that money on a delivery system that doesn’t work, and they’re going to stick with it.”

Clark wants the district to lease portables on parochial school grounds or on neutral sites. On Feb. 4, he filed a formal complaint with the state Education Department, charging that “the district has demonstrated an inability and/or unwillingness to deliver equitable . . . services to our students.”

The San Diego school board rejected the leasing option because of the cost, choosing instead to tutor students in the fleet of re-conditioned buses at a cost of about $250,000. Officials argue that the local diocese turned down their offers to teach parochial school students at public schools during the school day, after school, on Saturdays and during the summer.

William Rose, project resource teacher for the city schools, said the difficulties aboard the school buses are not as severe as Catholic school leaders contend. District officials have been working since August to purchase and outfit the buses, he said.

Rose said that the district’s program for teaching private school students--revised this month to bring the number of buses up from nine to 12--provides equitable instruction for them. The district hopes to have all 12 buses on the road by the end of April, Courter said.

Watching closely from the sidelines is the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has hinted that it would sue if the district chose the leasing option. To date, the organization has taken no action.

McElligott first complained to the federal government in September. Meetings were held between federal, state and local school officials and Catholic school leaders in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento--the four cities where the largest number of eligible Catholic students attend school.

But McElligott renewed the complaint Feb. 7, saying that “the San Diego Unified School District, whose plan has yet to become minimally operational, has demonstrated an inability to deliver services of sufficient size, scope and quality to give reasonable promise of substantial progress toward meeting the special educational needs of our children.”

The letter asks the federal officials “to determine whether within California, in general, there has been substantial failure to provide equitable services to our children and, quite specifically, whether within the San Diego Unified School District, a substantial failure exists.” It also seeks “remedial action” by the federal Department of Education.

The federal officials could ultimately “bypass” the local school district, allowing another non-religious organization to receive the federal funds and administer the program. McElligott has not yet asked for such a measure.

Other Catholic school officials are threatening similar action. “Our people are forebearing and they have the patience of Job,” said Duffy, the U.S. Catholic Conference official. “But their patience is wearing thin and I think they are going to deluge the Department of Education with complaints.”