School Budget Would Trigger Layoffs of 269

A feuding, frustrated Los Angeles Board of Education on Thursday ground out a precariously balanced, tentative budget that triggers 269 layoffs and hinges in part on improving student attendance.

Most of the layoffs, part of an overall work force reduction that took about 1,000 jobs, are among the lower-paying, so-called “classified” jobs--including clerical and other office workers, custodians, maintenance workers and cafeteria staff. Many of those jobs are held by blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

“This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done since I’ve been in public office,” Board President Jackie Goldberg said as the board approved its preliminary 1990-91 spending package on a 6-1 vote.

Golberg noted that up to $120 million more will have to be made by the time a final budget is adopted in late August if the governor’s proposals to ease the state’s own financial problems are approved.

In finishing their chore of slicing $220 million--more than 5%--from a tentative budget of just under $4 billion, the board chopped another $8 million from individual school budgets. The amount each school will lose, along with whether school community councils can help decide how to spend what is left, will be decided later.

The board saved $6.8 million by requiring all non-teaching employees who work 11 or 12 months of the year to work five days less next year, resulting in pay cuts of about 2%. The total pay loss will be as high as 15% for some of those employees who were also affected in earlier rounds of budget-cutting.

The board took another $9.8 million from the already hard-hit district administrative offices. Robert Booker, the district’s chief business and financial officer, said he believes that amount can be raised by having the schools do a more aggressive job of improving student attendance. The state pays districts based on how many students show up for class, so those with low attendance rates lose money.

There will be an incentive plan to encourage schools to redouble attendance efforts despite shrinking staff and other resources. If attendance can be boosted, Booker told dubious board members, it is unlikely that more jobs will be lost.

Board member Rita Walters was infuriated by a vote of a majority of board members to set aside $500,000 to keep six principals from being replaced by administrators with more seniority who will be demoted to save money. Of those principals scheduled to be bumped, only those who will head up campuses that are moving to school-based management will be spared. Under school-based management, most decisions are made by groups at the school instead of district headquarters.

“There is no fairness here!” burst out Walters, who felt the funds should have gone toward saving the jobs of those workers “who, come Sunday (the start of the fiscal year), are out on the street.” Walters, who cast the only vote against the budget, accused her colleagues of making policies that are anti-black. Walters is the only black member of the board.

But it was a vote to add 21 more schools to the list of those getting increasingly scarce integration funds that sparked the sharpest clash of the long, tense day.

The schools are the latest in the increasingly minority district to reach a point at which 70% of their students are Latino, black, Asian or other non-Anglos, making them available for special funds to ease the harms of segregation.

Walters objected that these schools, many of them in more affluent, suburban neighborhoods, would take money away from inner-city “children who need it most.”

“I’m frankly sick of your making a racial issue out of everything,” exclaimed San Fernando Valley board member Julie Korenstein, who said many of the 21 schools have large numbers of inner-city children bused in from crowded schools elsewhere.

“People who don’t know anything should keep their mouths shut,” Walters shot back.

In earlier rounds of budget cutting, the board saved nearly $1 million by freezing the pay of its top 111 administrators, took $8 million in lottery funds away from schools and increased some class sizes. It also eliminated the district’s staff of school physicians and sliced deeply into custodial, maintenance and other services, including teacher training.

And in chopping $43 million and 634 jobs from district administration, the board set in motion the bumping actions in which those in offices whose jobs are cut are sent back to the schools, displacing principals and others with less seniority.

The board allowed the layoffs to proceed after a last-ditch attempt to save them met with a lukewarm reception. A coalition of black leaders and educators on Monday called on all employees to donate 4% of their paychecks next year to the district. But on Thursday just three employee groups stepped forward.

Two groups of administrators offered to make the donation if everyone else did, and the union that represents about 5,000 office and technical workers said it would consider doing so to save the 100 jobs lost in its own group.