Modest Boost in Funds for Schools, Colleges Proposed

After several years of sharp increases in state appropriations for education, Gov. George Deukmejian’s new budget calls for only modest increases in money for the state’s public schools and colleges.

But state education officials said Thursday that the increase is insufficient and will force cutbacks, particularly in the elementary and secondary schools.

“Overall, this budget is a disaster,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said. “The public is going to rise up in anger when they find out” that the governor has “turned off the spigot” and jeopardized the progress schools have made in the last four years.

In the budget released Thursday, elementary and secondary schools would receive 4% more for each student next year.

The only major new appropriations in the education budget were a $60-million proposal over two years to reduce first-grade class sizes, and $66 million to improve and expand special education programs. Under the class-reduction proposal, the average size of first-grade classes, for example, would shrink from 28 to 22 pupils.

To pay for the class reductions, the governor proposed eliminating programs that benefit American Indians, the gifted and underachieving students.

“That’s robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Honig said. “The regular programs of every district in the state are going to suffer substantially.”

The austere budget, he said, will effectively “wipe out what the lottery put in” to state education. For 1987-88, the budget projects that the lottery will provide $608 million, or 2.7%, of the total education expenditures of $22.5 billion.

Supporters of the programs targeted for elimination were outraged. Typical was the response of Allyn Arnold, who recently retired after 18 years as coordinator of gifted education programs for the Los Angeles school district.

He said gifted programs, which serve about 200,000 students statewide, have been chronically underfunded for years, and added, “This is going back to the Dark Ages for gifted education.”

Higher education officials were not heartened by the governor’s budget proposals either. The University of California and California State University systems have been offered increases of about 4%, considerably more modest than the budget increases totaling nearly 50% that they received over the last three years.

Match the Rate

If the Legislature goes along with the governor’s plan, the higher-education increase would about match the rate of inflation and would not allow for any real growth in campus expenses. The probable result would be that salary raises for faculty and other staff would be smaller than the universities had hoped for, and increases in student fees and a general squeeze on overall campus services would be all but certain.

The governor’s proposals reflect “a very tight budget year for the university, as it does for state government generally,” UC President David P. Gardner said.

“This budget almost allows us to hold the line,” added William B. Baker, UC’s vice president for budget matters.

To keep UC and Cal State competitive with comparable universities in recruiting and retaining faculty, UC had requested a 5.7% increase in its allocation for faculty salaries, and Cal State had asked for 7%. The governor recommended an increase of just 3% and urged that it be delayed until midyear, meaning, in effect, that professors would get only a 1.5% boost for the year.

Additionally, the governor wants to raise student fees by about 9% at the universities.

Figures provided by the governor’s office describe the year-to-year increases for UC and Cal State as 5.6% and 5.5%, respectively. Separately, however, the governor calls on both systems to make unspecified cuts of 1% for next year out of the total they have been allocated.

In an effort to deal with a budget shortfall, Deukmejian last month also ordered the two university systems and most other state agencies to cut their operating budgets by 2% for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. The two systems will be deciding shortly how to make those cuts, but options include freezes in hiring and purchasing, as well as imposing substantial midyear fee increases for students.

For the state’s 106 community colleges, the governor’s recommendation was similar: an increase of 4.4% over last year.

The budget does not contain funds to help stabilize colleges that have experienced severe enrollment decreases, such as Los Angeles’ nine-college system. Tom Fallo, vice chancellor for business for the Los Angeles Community College District, said the news that the district may lose those funds may mean “serious cutbacks.”

Additionally, the budget offered only $7 million to begin development of a statewide student assessment and counseling program for the two-year colleges, a key reform that state community college Chancellor Joshua Smith said will cost $50 million.

Smith said he is disappointed by the modesty of the overall increase and saddened by the meager allocation for the assessment program.

“These are small steps toward reform, not giant ones,” he said of the governor’s budget proposals. “It’s not something that has me ebullient.”

Overhaul Urged

A special state commission responsible for assessing the higher-education systems has called for an overhaul of the two-year colleges, but the changes it outlined in a report last year are expensive and the governor has been slow in allocating the dollars needed to fund major reforms.

The governor designated $140 million for capital improvements on UC campuses. Among the projects that may be funded are preliminary plans for a chemistry and biological sciences building at UCLA; new library facilities at San Francisco, San Diego and Santa Cruz; a new science facility at Santa Barbara, and a cancer center at Irvine.

For the Cal State system, $108.8 million was earmarked for similar capital projects.

Although the largest part of the education budget--31.6%--is devoted to programs for kindergarten through 12th grade, Honig said the small overall increase provided in the new budget will not help the state close the per-pupil spending gap between California and most other states. California is ranked 23rd in per-pupil expenditures nationwide, spending $3,608. Alaska, the No. 1-ranked state, spends $8,349 to educate each of its students, and New York spends $5,710.

In Los Angeles, school Supt. Harry Handler described the governor’s budget proposal as one that would cause the district serious problems and estimated that the program cuts called for would cost the district about $100 million.

A proposal by the governor that teacher cost-of-living increases be held to 1% made teachers’ union officials gloomy, as well. In Los Angeles, for instance, teachers are asking for a 14% raise this year, and the district has offered to settle at 7%.

Ed Foglia, president of the California Teachers Assn., the state’s major teachers union, said that a 1% cost-of-living increase “really amounts to a salary reduction because it takes 3% just to move people along with inflation.”

Times education writer Anne C. Roark in Los Angeles contributed to this article.