CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / PROPOSITION 123 : $800 Million Asked for New Schools

When the bell rings and classes change at the overcrowded Kerr Middle School in this booming Sacramento suburb, the scene resembles an adolescent version of the commuter rush at Grand Central Station.

Throngs of seventh- and eighth-graders move from one classroom building to another, pushing and shoving, sometime getting into fights.

“We have too many kids here,” said Kerr’s veteran principal, Arnold Adreani. ‘We have to spend a lot of time on conflict management.”

Ten or 11 years ago, Kerr had an enrollment of 1,100 to 1,200. This semester it is 1,896. Thirty-two of the 85 teachers are new to the school this year. There are three lunch periods, running from 11:10 in the morning until 1:45 in the afternoon. Students must line up for half an hour or more to board the buses that take them home, sometimes an hour and a half away. Fights break out in the bus lines, too.

Kerr is one of two middle schools in a district that has grown from 25,000 students to 44,000 in the last five years, as young, middle-class families move to the Central Valley in search of affordable housing.

A third middle school is “desperately needed,” said Vernon M. H. Chang, deputy superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified School District.

Whether that school, and many others, is built depends on passage of Proposition 123, an $800-million school construction bond issue on the June 5 ballot.

However, educators warn that the money from Proposition 123, and another $800 million to $900 million from a bond issue that probably will appear on the November ballot, amount to little more than a drop in a deep bucket of need.

The State Allocation Board, which distributes state funds to local school districts, reports a backlog of more than $6 billion in eligible projects. But the board has had no money to allocate since last September.

Elk Grove, which was pasture land and strawberry fields a couple of decades ago, now needs about $250 million to house its booming school-age population. And to the south, the Los Angeles Unified School District alone needs more than $1 billion to build new schools and improve others.

“We’re out of elementary seats right now,” said Douglas Brown, director of building services in Los Angeles. “We need 40,000 additional seats in the next five years.” Los Angeles buses more than 25,000 students to relieve overcrowding and is gradually shifting all 600 district schools to year-round operation.

Soaring statewide enrollment increases, fueled by high birth and immigration rates, have made a shambles of the state’s plans to accommodate new students.

Four years ago all of the interested parties--the Deukmejian Administration, legislative leaders, state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, the various educational organizations, the California Building Industry Assn. and other business interests--agreed that about $1 billion a year should be spent for new public school facilities for the next five years.

But the unexpected enrollment increases have pushed the needed amount to about $2 billion a year and nobody knows where that much money might come from.

“It has become clear that the state program won’t be enough,” said Diane Kirkham, special adviser to Honig. “We’re slipping further behind . . . we are desperate to find other solutions to the problem.”

State-backed general obligation bonds will remain a crucial part of any future plan, most believe. But, increasingly, more attention is being paid to efforts to allow greater local participation in school construction.

State Sen. Bill Leonard (R-Big Bear) is sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would reverse Proposition 13 and allow local communities to pass bond issues for schools or other needed projects by majority vote instead of two-thirds.

Kevin Henley, an aide to Leonard, said that only 46% of 138 local bond measures have been approved since 1986 but that 86% would have been been approved if the needed margin had been a simple majority.

Leonard is a conservative Republican but his proposal still faces strong opposition from conservatives in his own party, especially in the Assembly, who believe it breaks with the spirit of Proposition 13 and the Gann limit on state spending.

Gov. George Deukmejian supports reducing the required vote from two-thirds to 60%, a proposal that has been introduced as legislation by Assemblyman Robert C. Frazee (R-Carlsbad). It is not known if the governor would support Leonard’s majority-vote measure, should it pass the Legislature.

Special assessment districts for school construction are another local option with increasing appeal. These require approval by the majority of property owners in a given geographical area. Few have been successful in the past, but they may grow more popular if the state money supply continues to run dry.

There are other ideas. State Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) wants to extend the special half-cent earthquake state sales tax increase for 10 years, using the money to pay the interest on school construction bonds. But both Deukmejian and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown have rejected that idea.

Whatever solution is eventually reached, more statewide bond issues will be part of it and the $800-million proposal facing voters on June 5 will be first in line.

There is no organized opposition to Proposition 123. Both the watchdog California Taxpayers Assn. and business organizations like the California Chamber of Commerce support it.

But there is some anxiety among the measure’s backers that voters are being asked to support too many bond issues for too many different purposes--schools, colleges and universities, prisons, mass transit lines and programs for the homeless--and that they may decide to reject one or more of these requests.