Schools to Consider Changes in Busing Plan : Education: L.A. board will take up reorganization of program that sends students from overcrowded Mid-City campuses to suburban areas.

In response to a year of unprecedented enrollment growth in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which sent waves of Mid-City children surging into suburban schools, the school board today will consider reorganizing its program for busing students to relieve overcrowding.

The district grew by more than 15,000 students this school year--most of them in already overcrowded neighborhoods--forcing its Capacity Adjustment Program to quickly find space for almost twice as many children as it handled the year before and wreaking havoc on some small suburban schools that suddenly had to absorb hundreds of new students.

The students came in by the busload throughout the first several months of the school year last fall, forcing receiving schools to scrap carefully conceived classroom arrangements and scramble to find enough teachers, supplies and space for the new pupils.

Those schools resembled “a (bus) terminal, where kids are getting bused in and out,” said board member Mark Slavkin, sponsor of the motion to revamp the CAP to provide more predictability and stability at sending and receiving schools.

His motion calls on district staff to find ways to channel more money to receiving schools for educational programs for new students; match up sending and receiving schools according to high school attendance area, so students can move through each grade level together; and reduce travel time for bused students, some of whom spend up to 2 1/2 hours on the bus each day.

“The CAP program was set up years ago as a stopgap effort to deal with a couple of overcrowded schools,” said Slavkin, who represents the Westside. “It’s time we stop to take a look at what we’re doing and try to reorganize it in a way that makes sense from an educational standpoint.”

The chaos that resulted from last year’s unexpected enrollment surge led to a rash of complaints from parents, teachers and administrators at receiving schools, where there were too few bilingual teachers to handle the mostly Spanish-speaking newcomers and instructional materials were hard to come by.

Many schools had to reorganize several times last semester, breaking up classrooms and reassigning teachers to handle new students who seemed to just keep coming.

At overcrowded sending schools, new students were squeezed into already-packed classrooms or held in auditoriums for weeks, while district officials searched for room in other schools and rearranged bus schedules and routes to get them there.

“We were operating in a crisis mode, just trying to get them someplace,” recalled board member Warren Furutani.

Officials say they hope the program will run more smoothly next fall, in part because the district’s overcrowding relief plan--which requires more than 100 schools to increase their capacity by 23% this year--should create more space at both sending and receiving schools, making it easier to find seats for new students.

The additional space could also be used to set up special language-assessment and instruction centers in receiving schools, where incoming CAP students could be tested and taught in their native language, if they were not proficient enough to keep up in an English-language class.

The assessment process would allow receiving schools time to arrange for placement of the new students and the new bilingual classrooms would relieve much of the strain that resulted last year when thousands of students who spoke no English wound up languishing in English-only classes at their receiving schools.

“We have the opportunity now at schools where there will be space to set aside two or three classrooms as a place where assessment would take place to see if the new student fits into an existing program in the school, and if not, we could offer full bilingual classes (in the centers),” said assistant superintendent Amelia McKenna.

That model is predicated on the availability of bilingual teachers--always in short supply in the district. But McKenna said a proposal to give receiver schools the same priority in the assignment of bilingual teachers that schools in predominantly Latino neighborhoods have--coupled with a $5,000 incentive payment to bilingual teachers--would help the district staff the new student centers, if the concept is approved by the board.

The district has also made it easier for school principals to find bilingual classroom aides, by establishing a toll-free phone number linked to a computer bank of candidates. Last year, many receiver schools had trouble finding aides who spoke Spanish to help out in classrooms filled with Spanish-speaking youngsters and teachers who spoke only English.

The board is likely to approve Slavkin’s proposal today and ask its staff to come up with specific plans. But a final vote is probably months away and may follow protracted debate, as board members balance their competing interests--making it easier for receiving schools to absorb the newcomers while lightening the burden on those students who must travel out of their neighborhoods to school.

Almost 25,000 children are bused each day from their neighborhood schools to less-crowded campuses in the San Fernando Valley, South Bay and on the Westside, but space is rapidly disappearing in those schools as well.

Union Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles had been sending the children it couldn’t hold to Pacific Palisades Elementary, until last fall when that school filled up.

By the time Wilbur Avenue in Tarzana had been selected as its next receiver, Union had collected more than 40 students to bus out, and that increased to 71 by October.

Each spring, district officials try to estimate how many students will have to be “capped” out of their overcrowded neighborhood schools the next fall, and designate receiver schools to bus them to.

Extra teachers are sent to those schools from a special pool of more than 100 instructors. They are assigned as few as 20 students per class, to leave room for new bused-in pupils.

But last year, district officials were caught by surprise by the deluge of new students that never let up.

BACKGROUND

The district’s Capacity Adjustment Program began 10 years ago, busing a few thousand children from packed East Los Angeles schools, to relieve overcrowding that had been called one of the “ills of segregation” by the judge presiding over the district’s desegregation case. Then, there was plenty of classroom space at schools a short bus ride away. But since then the district has grown dramatically and now nearly 25,000 of the district’s 610,000 students have to be bused away from overcrowded schools.