Inner-City School Aid Veto: Partisan Politics or Equity?

When Gov. George Deukmejian drew his blue-pencil through $86.6 million the Legislature had earmarked for school districts with substantial inner-city enrollments, California school districts were mortified, if not surprised.

The governor had proposed eliminating the money last January, but two weeks ago when he actually axed the special grants--called urban impact aid and Meade aid--school officials up and down the state shuddered.

When the bad news was broken to the leaders of the largest urban districts at a Sacramento meeting, one participant, Compton schools Supt. Ted D. Kimbrough, described the mood as “like a funeral. People were saying, ‘Where should we bury the corpse?’ ”

Urban impact aid and Meade aid were created by the Legislature in 1978 to help urban school districts cover the extra costs of educating poor and minority children. Among the major needs were teaching children not fluent in standard English and fighting vandalism and school crime.

Deukmejian’s critics say his veto of the $86.6 million--which represents more than half of the $170 million worth of cuts the governor ordered in the budget for kindergarten through 12th grades--was politically motivated.

The governor’s veto of the urban aid “was a partisan thing to do,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, whose charges that the public schools were badly shortchanged in the budget put him in bad graces with the governor. “The cuts hit primarily Democratic areas of the state. (The urban impact aid) was just a convenient target.”

Deukmejian’s education adviser, Peter G. Mehas, said the governor vetoed the money not because of party politics but because the formula used for distributing urban aid is “very unequal and unfair. It’s a matter of equity.”

The problem, Mehas pointed out, is the 1978 law that spelled out the criteria that districts must meet to receive the urban impact aid.

That law said only urban districts that had certain levels of poverty, ethnicity and transiency present in 1978 could qualify for the aid. For the most part, districts that meet these criteria such as Compton, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, happen to be represented by Democratic lawmakers.

A number of other districts that do not qualify for aid have undergone dramatic demographic changes due to Asian and Latino immigration since 1978. In the Garden Grove, Lynwood, Norwalk-La Mirada and Riverside school districts, the number of poor and minority students has grown substantially in recent years. In Garden Grove, for instance, the minority enrollment has doubled to 50% since 1978, with Asian pupils representing the fastest-growing ethnic group.

Coincidentally, Republicans represent large parts of three of those districts. Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), whose district includes Garden Grove, has led the most recent effort to change the formula to benefit the other school districts.

“Those districts are saying, ‘Gee you’ve got to recut this pie to include us,’ ” said former state Sen. Dennis Carpenter, a Sacramento lobbyist whose clients include the Garden Grove school district.

Of Orange County’s 28 school districts, only Santa Ana Unified has received urban impact aid, according to the state Department of Education.

Administrators of other Orange County school districts claim the fact that the state’s third largest county gets the aid in only one district proves the allocation formula has been faulty.

Ed Dundon, superintendent of Garden Grove Unified School District, the second largest in Orange County behind Santa Ana Unified, said: “We’ve never received urban impact aid. That formula of the 1970s just locked in a few large districts, and we weren’t one of them.”

Garden Grove Unified last school year had 36,500 students, Santa Ana Unified 37,000.

“If that aid is good for one district, it’s good for all similar districts,” Dundon said. “I think fair is fair. The formula needs to be changed.”

Pay for Teachers’ Aides

Anthony A. Dalessi, an assistant superintendent in Santa Ana Unified, said the district received about $930,000 from the state last year in urban impact aid and used it to pay for teachers’ aides in bilingual education classes.

“It is very important to our school district to have money for these aides because 50% of our students are limited-English speakers,” Dalessi said.

The unexpected loss of that money because of Gov. Deukmejian’s veto means “we have to cut into other programs,” Dalessi said.

Until this year, large urban districts that have received the aid opposed changing the 1978 formula. But the governor has given them cause to reconsider their opposition.

In denying the urban impact aid this year, Deukmejian took the side of Garden Grove and other districts that want to be included. He said the information on which the funding was based was “over 10 years old and . . . (has) not confirmed that those districts eligible for these funds have higher educational costs than those districts which are not eligible.”

Thus, he blue-pencilled the entire appropriation.

‘Absolutely Ridiculous’

Assemblywoman Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, said the governor’s action was “absolutely ridiculous, unfair and silly. Just because every district entitled to (the money) is not getting it, that does not mean you penalize all districts. . . . This money is the lifeblood of large urban districts . . . and he’s making them bleed to death.”

According to Deukmejian adviser Mehas, the governor believes that some districts that were slated to receive the funding are not as poor or as heavily minority as they were when the aid was created and that he would like to see “validation” of the districts’ higher spending needs. “The state Department of Education has not provided that documentation,” he said.

An Education Department spokesman said there are no studies that specifically confirm that urban districts in California have higher costs than rural or suburban districts. But district officials and other education experts say that the proof is easy to obtain.

“Look inside a district’s budget and see where they spend the money,” said John Mockler, a lobbyist for the Urban School Districts Assn. who helped to write the legislation that created the special funding. “For example, Los Angeles spends a lot on things other districts don’t have to contend with. They spend $20 million on ESL (English as a second language programs), $15 million on security. Beverly Hills doesn’t do that.

“If the governor wants equity,” Mockler said, “why not take some money away from Beverly Hills? But no one is proposing that. (Instead) the fight has been to make the poor pay for the poor.”

$37 Million Lost

In total dollars, the Los Angeles school district was the biggest loser: It is out $37 million. Because it took the precaution of not counting the money into its budget for the 1987-88 school year, it will just about break even. But the district is far from having enough money to cover its needs or keep up with the rapidly rising costs of textbooks, equipment and other supplies. Leaky roofs will not be fixed, and antiquated lavatories will have to wait longer for remodeling. “We just won’t provide as much money for additional classroom supplies . . . and we won’t be able to provide the staff to make schools cleaner or to catch up with maintenance programs,” spokesman Bill Rivera said.

The 2.5% cost-of-living allowance the governor granted school districts means a $66 per student increase for every district. In Los Angeles, the elimination of the urban impact aid means a loss of $62 per student. So the district was able to balance its books without making drastic cuts.

But Compton, one of the poorest districts in the state, suffered a net loss of $78 per pupil--or $3,000 per classroom--the highest loss per student of any district.

As a result, Compton will be forced to eliminate successful dropout prevention, tutorial and remediation programs at a time when it had begun to make substantial progress in raising achievement and keeping students in school, Supt. Kimbrough said. It will have to dig deeply into its own rapidly diminishing revenues to pay for other expenses the special funds would have covered, such as extra school police and insurance bills driven up by excessive vandalism.

When that is done, the district will be left with barely 1% of its $106-million budget in reserve--not much of a safety net.

‘State of Depression’

“My God, what are we supposed to do now?” Kimbrough said in an interview last week. “You can’t ask us to stop dropouts and make kids ready to become adults and enter the work force if you take away the vehicle by which we do that. It’s so disheartening. . . . I get into a state of depression.”

After Compton, the next hardest-hit district was Oakland, which lost $54 per student. Because the state’s 2.5% cost-of-living allowance is not sufficient to cover rising salary costs--Oakland teachers won a 7% raise this year--the district faces a $23-million deficit and the prospect of eliminating 600 jobs. The district has already laid off 57 school psychologists, nurses and counselors, district spokeswoman Marian Magid said.

Leaders of the large urban districts said they are willing to compromise on the funding formula and take a smaller share if that is what it will take to persuade the governor to restore the $86 million. “If in fact the issue is equity and there will be no more money added to the pot,” said Ron Prescott, legislative analyst for the Los Angeles school district, “we would cooperate with that.”

When the Legislature returns from its four-week recess in August, Assemblywoman Hughes said she is hopeful that a bipartisan agreement can be hammered out that will restore the funds and increase the total appropriation.

“With the tremendous surplus (in the state treasury), it makes sense,” she said. “But the real question is if the governor is willing to assist us.”

Times staff writer Bill Billiter contributed to this article.