County Group Joins Drive to Increase School Funds

A group of 75 parents and educators met Wednesday to start a drive to gather 75,000 Orange County signatures as part of a statewide effort to devote more government money to education.

The meeting at the Orange County Department of Education headquarters in Costa Mesa involved the Orange County chapter of the California Movement for Educational Reform. CMER was formed earlier this year by state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

The state group seeks grass-roots support for a proposition that would change the Gann Initiative of 1979. That initiative, which is now law, limits how much government can spend in a year, and thus limits potential money for education.

‘All Districts to Help’

“We can’t do much to help schools until we change the Gann spending limit,” said Cheryl Norton, of Fountain Valley, co-chairwoman of the county CMER chapter.

“Today, we have representatives here of most of the 28 school districts in the county. All of the districts are going to help gather signatures to change the Gann limits.”

The Gann measure limits a governmental unit’s budget to grow no more in a single year than the percentage increase in the U.S. Consumer Price Index. The change proposed by CMER would shift to the California Consumer Price Index, which is usually higher than the federal level.

The Gann limit hit the state budget this year for the first time. Honig has declared that education was the chief victim. Because of the limit, the state, starting in November, is rebating $1.1 billion to individual taxpayers.

Honig contends that the money should instead help the schools. Honig and other educators have called for the new initiative to change the Gann limits.

Million Signatures Needed

“To qualify this initiative (to change the Gann measure), we will need about a million signatures statewide,” said Peter Birdsall of Sacramento, CMER’s director. In Orange County, about 75,000 signatures will be sought.

“PTA groups and other organizations in each school district will be setting up tables to get voter signatures,” Birdsall said. “Today, at this meeting, two things were going on: We were telling about the specific legal requirements for these signature petitions, and secondly, we were letting these Orange County people know they are not alone. A statewide effort is going on to help the schools.”

If the one million signatures are collected by November, Birdsall said, the proposal to change the Gann spending limits would be on the June, 1988, statewide ballot.