Budget Cuts Knock at Classroom Door : Education: The Los Angeles school board is expected to begin deciding today where to slash another $101 million from next fiscal year’s budget.

Judith Haut worries about high school students driving along busy, curving Topanga Canyon Boulevard if the Los Angeles Board of Education drops bus service to help dig its way out of a huge budget hole.

Dorothy Clark is appalled that her child’s magnet elementary school in the Fairfax area might have to surrender the state lottery proceeds that provided art, music and other special projects this year.

Gilberto Luna, a counselor at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles, fears that cuts in the counseling staff will have a devastating effect on efforts to keep minority students from dropping out.

Others shrink from the specters--of dirtier buildings, bigger classes, fewer security aides on crowded playgrounds--conjured up by a proposed “cut list” that would claim 1,300 jobs.

As board members struggle to slash another $101 million from the coming fiscal year’s budget, they are finding it increasingly tough to keep the cuts away from the classroom. Unlike the first $119 million board members eliminated earlier this year--largely by juggling funds and cutting 634 district administrative jobs--the choices awaiting them today are “hovering right there at the school . . . and that is really, really painful,” board member Warren Furutani said.

The state’s largest school district is not alone in having to cope with scarce dollars. Districts up and down California, from Beverly Hills to Richmond in the Bay Area to Redding and Yuba City in the north, are looking for ways to cut programs and jobs in the face of rising costs and tightened funding from the state, which provides most of local schools’ money. Grant Union High School District near Sacramento has voted to lay off teachers, as has Acalanes, a high school district in an affluent Bay Area suburb.

In Los Angeles, the job of delivering a balanced, tentative spending plan to the county by June 30 has been further complicated by the refusal of board members Rita Walters and Leticia Quezada to vote for any of the proposed cuts. That has put extra pressure on their five colleagues as the 610,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District finds itself in its biggest financial jam since voters slashed property taxes with Proposition 13 in 1978.

“Ms. Quezada and Ms. Walters have taken a powder on (voting on) the cuts, and that just makes it all the more difficult for the rest of us,” said Roberta Weintraub, echoing sentiments expressed by most other board members.

And things could get worse. If the Legislature does not sweeten the governor’s budget proposals in several key areas for the state’s schools, the district could find itself short another $80 million by the time the board must adopt a final 1990-91 budget of just over $4 billion in the fall.

“It’s a devastating situation, and board members have a very, very difficult job,” said Cecelia Mansfield, president of the 31st District PTA, which represents district schools in the San Fernando Valley. She, like some others, is advocating a state tax increase for schools.

Robert Booker, the district’s chief business and financial officer, said the board’s message to administrators was clear: “The bottom line was keep cuts away from schools and classrooms . . . but the amount is so substantial that it is not going to be possible to not affect schools.”

The board recently hired the accounting firm of Coopers and Lybrand to help it overhaul the district and recommend ways to make further cuts. The firm’s report is to be made public today, when board members are expected to vote on at least some reductions. They also will get another $32 million or so in alternatives to consider but will vote on those later.

Board members demanded some alternatives to the list drawn up by Supt. Leonard Britton and district financial officers after meetings with the board, PTA, union leaders and school and community representatives.

“I don’t believe those are the only choices,” said board member Mark Slavkin, adding that he is not convinced the $33 million recently sliced in a 20% reduction of district administration went far enough.

“There is lots here I won’t vote for; that’s why I want some alternatives,” board President Jackie Goldberg said.

Testimony at several public hearings held by the board on the suggested cuts and calls to district offices provide glimpses of what various cuts will mean.

For instance, many parents and teachers are objecting to a proposal to take away the $8 million in lottery funds now distributed among the schools to spend as they see fit. The district already spends most of its $112 million annual share of lottery profits on salaries and other fixed costs, despite the uncertainty over just how much money will be coming from year to year.

Some of the most emotional testimony has come from employees in areas that stand to lose many jobs, many of which are positions held by women and minority group members.

How did the district get into the position of having to make what will be record reductions? Several factors, including years of exploding enrollment and rising costs that constantly outstripped increases in state funding, contributed to this year’s difficulties. The board also solved--some say ducked--many of its budget problems in other years by taking “one-time savings” and borrowing against reserves or other funds that it was not compelled to spend on intended purposes right away.

“We’ve absolutely depleted reserves and borrowed the heck out of building and deferred maintenance and other funds,” said board veteran Weintraub. “Booker (the budget chief) has been warning us for many years that we were in deficit by using one-time money, that those problems would just be waiting for us in the next year.

“We always got rescued at the last minute (with added state funds), and that makes it difficult to believe we won’t be rescued again, but (because of the state’s own projected deficit this year) we won’t be.”

Walters and Quezada have angered other board members with their flat refusal to vote for any of the cuts. Quezada said she is protesting the lack of alternatives and complained that administrators have ignored board members’ suggestions.

“The only thing I have as a board member, my only prerogative, is my vote,” Quezada said. “I guard that, I treasure that, and I use it conscientiously. I don’t believe in these cuts. I cannot in good conscience vote for them.”

And Walters said she warned board members in May, 1989, when all but she voted to settle a teachers strike by giving raises of 8% a year for three years. She said that teachers deserved the money but that she did not see how the district could afford it, especially if the result was to cut other jobs and badly needed school services.

“Folks sit there and complain they have no choices,” Walters said. “Well, they did have choices last year.”

Others, including Furutani, say it is irresponsible and inaccurate to blame teacher salary increases for the entire, complicated budget problem.

“This is the result of many problems, some of which were there long before many of us were even on the board,” Furutani said.

Angered at being blamed for the district’s budget problems and worried about what will happen when their contract expires in another year, United Teachers-Los Angeles and other unions have refused the district’s request to reopen negotiations on this year’s salaries and benefits. UTLA has repeatedly infuriated district officials by accusing them of “hiding” money and refusing to cut administrative “fat.”

But recently, acknowledging that the district will be in dire financial straits without some help from Sacramento, union leaders joined district officials and parents in a campaign to get more state dollars.

Times education writer Sandy Banks contributed to this report.

WHERE THE CUTS MAY FALL These are some of the more controversial budget cuts the Los Angeles Board of Education is considering as it struggles to erase a projected $220-million gap between spending and revenues in the coming fiscal year. PROPOSAL: SAVINGS * Cut school police patrols by eliminating 14 unfilled positions and cutting 131 campus security aide jobs: $1.6 million. * Cut custodial services by 15%, with the resulting loss of 386 jobs. Classrooms would be swept every third day instead of every other day and would be vacuumed once every three weeks: $12.1 million. * Cut maintenance services by 6.3%, eliminating 112 jobs and forcing further delays in replacing broken windows and in fixing heating, plumbing, classroom and playground equipment and other facility problems: $6.1 million. * Cut instructional supports--such as counselors and librarians--at junior and senior high schools, a loss of 274 positions: $10 million. * Cut the number of assistant principals by 56, resulting in less time for working with students, parents, teachers and other staff members and increasing the duties of other campus administrators: $3.9 million. * Eliminate district-sponsored after-school and weekend playground programs at senior high schools and reducing them at junior highs: $700,000. * Eliminate bus transportation at 28 schools plus a center for pregnant students for those who live too far away to walk, cannot get public transportation or whose route to school is dangerous: $1.3 million. * Take the California Lottery funds that are distributed to local schools to spend as they wish and use the money to help reduce the expected deficit; many schools would be deprived of their only “discretionary” funds to buy extra equipment or programs for their students: $8.1 million. * Eliminate the smaller class sizes for regular classes that include some special education students, eliminating 98 teaching jobs: $3.6 million. * Cut by 15% the instructional materials budgets for kindergarten through eighth-grade classes and for special education classes: $1.7 million. * Increase class sizes by two students each in grades 11 and 12, eliminating 130 teaching positions: $4.8 million. SOURCE: Los Angeles Unified School District