Top-Level Raises First to Go in School Budget Cuts

Top administrators of the Los Angeles Unified School District will get no pay Raises this year, the Board of Education decided Monday night in beginning a series of votes designed to tighten the district’s budget.

Even as the board grappled with closing an unprecedented $220-million budget shortage, a private consultant told board members that, to keep the nation’s second-largest school district from going bankrupt, they will have to make even more painful cuts soon.

Barry Fuller of Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm hired by the district, and an advisory committee of business leaders said the district must find other areas for cutting and reorganizing within the coming year.

Because costs are rising faster than the revenues the district gets from the state and other sources, it “faces a severe financial crisis which poses a serious threat to its financial solvency,” Fuller said.

Most of the steps taken so far by the board as it lurches toward a June 30 deadline to submit a tentative, balanced spending plan have come from one-time savings by juggling funds and from cuts in district administration.

The board Monday evening voted to freeze the pay of 111 top administrators, whose salaries range from $75,000 to the $164,555 earned by Supt. Leonard Britton.

Then, after several hours of often emotional testimony and sometimes rancorous debate, the board began slicing into school services.

Going through thick blue and gray “cut books,” the board--in slashing $44 million--cut maintenance and custodial services, took away lottery funds from individual schools, and increased the size of classes that include some special education students. Board members postponed most of the toughest decisions, which would involve another $66 million in cuts, until a special session Thursday.

Earlier Monday, the budget crunch--the school district’s worst since California voters passed tax-slashing Proposition 13 in 1978--pushed board members onto a collision course over allocation of the district’s court-ordered desegregation funds.

The board will not vote until next week on its proposed $2.6-million integration spending plan, but members clashed sharply over what to do about adding new schools to the list of those eligible for special funds.

Up to now, any school in the rapidly growing And increasingly minority district that reached a point at which 70% of its students were Latino, black, Asian or other non-Anglo, was considered racially isolated and given extra money. The funds, designed to pay for smaller classes, extra counselors and special programs, are aimed at alleviating harmful effects of segregation listed by the court in a 1981 resolution of a lengthy desegregation case.

This year, it appears there may not be enough money to include 21 newly segregated schools. The schools, mainly in the San Fernando Valley, Westside and other historically Anglo areas, have passed the 70% minority mark.

Board member Rita Walters, who represents South-Central Los Angeles, said it would be wrong to give schools in more affluent areas the desegregation funds if it means taking money away from those who have suffered the most and longest.

But other board members, arguing that bused-in minorities have as much right to the special funds as those who stay in their neighborhood schools, said they want the entire integration spending program re-examined.

Peter James, the board’s attorney for integration programs, said the court would probably look askance at any arbitrary effort to change the funding rules.

In other action, the board began condemnation procedures on a 17-acre chunk of the former Ambassador Hotel site in the crowded Wilshire District. Developer Donald Trump heads an investment group that wants to build high-rise offices there and has vowed to stop the district from using the site for a high school.