No School Will Escape the Budget Cuts : Education: Board’s action to close the $220-million gap will bring larger classes, fewer textbooks and supplies. Dirtier classrooms, fewer services also likely.

Come September, kindergarten teachers at Parmelee Avenue Elementary School will have to vacuum their own classrooms or let their young students gather on dirty floors at story time.

The PTA at Vanalden Elementary will have to stage an extra fund-raiser or two to try to recoup the lost state lottery funds that paid for their children’s field trips to museums, the airport and the Los Angeles Harbor.

And Manual Arts High School teacher Joe Cervantes will have to find a new way to pay for improvements to his acclaimed machine shop class facilities, or risk losing students.

The sweeping budget cuts approved by the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District last week will touch virtually every school in the district this fall, bringing larger classes, less money for such basics as textbooks and paper, dirtier classrooms and fewer support services for schools that are already struggling to meet the needs of the district’s 610,000 students.

“I don’t think it has really hit (parents and teachers) how bad it’s going to be” when the cuts take effect, said Cathleen Kibala, principal at Parmelee in South-Central Los Angeles. “We are all going to suffer . . . and the children are going to suffer the most.”

After weeks of hand-wringing, the school board on Thursday closed a $220-million gap in its 1991 budget--$81 million of which represents cuts that land right at the schoolhouse door.

Schools will have less money to buy instructional materials like textbooks, or pay for special programs, activities or staff because they are losing lottery funds and facing deep cuts in campus budgets.

Students with learning problems and those with special medical needs will no longer be screened by district physicians, whose services have been eliminated.

Custodial and maintenance service cutbacks will mean classrooms will be swept and vacuumed less often. Plugged toilets, broken windows, malfunctioning air conditioners--all will take longer to repair.

Some schools will have fewer campus security aides.

And some schools will lose administrators, some of whom will be replaced by supervisors demoted from central offices.

In addition to budget cuts that directly affect the schools, some of the nearly $35 million in central and regional administrative reductions will also be felt in the classroom, including cuts in teacher training projects, volunteer and tutorial programs, and support services for bilingual education.

“There have been budget cuts every year, but nothing as serious as this year,” said Kibala, who has spent 21 years as a teacher and principal in the school district. “This is so drastic.”

Over the last several years, as costs have continued to outpace revenues, the district has often been forced to trim services. As a result, schools have suffered a steady erosion, and teachers, parents and administrators have gotten used to scrambling to make do with less.

“People just don’t realize how little money the schools have,” said Kelly Cooper, president of the 3rd Street Elementary PTA in Hancock Park. In her son’s third-grade class, she said, parents have had to spend their own money to photocopy math enrichment work sheets because there were not enough to go around.

And now, many parents and school officials fear they have been pushed beyond their limits by the cuts imposed last week.

“You always have to make choices, to figure out how to slice up the pie,” said Marvin Starer, principal of Manual Arts High School near the Los Angeles Coliseum. “But the pie has gotten so small now, it’s come down to choices like are you going to have a classroom teacher or a campus (security) aide. We can’t meet all the basic needs anymore.”

At his school, Starer faces the loss of two of his four assistant principals--who would be replaced by administrators demoted in staff cutbacks from central or regional offices--and the loss of more than $12,000 in lottery funds and another several thousand dollars that will be lopped from his school budget by September.

A large portion of the school’s lottery funds have been used to turn its industrial arts department into the pride of the district. Thousands have been spent to bring the district-issued, pre-World War II classroom training equipment up to today’s standards. The showcase inside the shop, lined with contest-winning ribbons, attests to the students’ skills.

“We’ve been able to give the students training that allows them to come out of school with salable skills, to go to work at places like JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) . . . to make $25 an hour right out of high school,” said machine shop instructor Cervantes.

“It’ll be devastating if our lottery funds are cut off,” he said.

Inner-city schools like Manual Arts and Parmelee will be hard-pressed to replace the money allocated by the district through proceeds from the California Lottery.

The district spends the bulk of its lottery money to pay salaries, but had given individual schools a portion--$5 per student, down from $20 in 1986--to spend on special projects for students. Now, that per-school allocation will revert to the district’s general fund to help balance the budget.

“A school like ours doesn’t have any extra money,” said Starer. “We can’t go to the booster club for $50,000 like a school in the Valley might. Our student body (organization) earns its money parking cars at the Coliseum.”

Some schools are luckier. The PTA at Vanalden Elementary in Reseda has pledged to try to make up the $2,500 the school would have received in lottery money next year, and many other schools’ PTAs will be called upon to do the same.

But, district PTA officials fear that may hurt other schools, since it will drain away money and energy usually spent on other projects, such as school health clinics.

“What’s going to happen is the same thing that happened after Proposition 13,” said Diane Brahams of the 10th District PTA, which represents the southern half of the school district. “PTAs will say, ‘Oh, this class needs globes, so we’ll buy globes.’ And that’s less money for our eye and dental clinics . . . which may then have to close.”

While the lottery cut is the most visible and emotional for many schools, the cuts in custodial and maintenance service will probably hit schools the hardest in September.

“You don’t really see things like that until you need the services and you start to request them and they’re not there,” said Vanalden Principal Teri Cooke. “A door jams, a lock breaks, a light won’t work . . . you call for repairs and what will happen?”

The deep cuts in school maintenance will stretch further the already long waiting periods for things like painting and playground repair. The elimination of the furniture refinishing unit will mean schools will have to make do with shabby desks and chairs.

Already, teachers at Parmelee Elementary have begun mopping their own classrooms “so the children have a clean place to come into,” said Kibala.

Kibala and her staff have tried to work around the deteriorating level of district-provided services, but they know it is going to get much worse.

“We’ve been rationing ditto paper for a month, and I guess we’ll have to cut the rations down,” she said. “We’ll have to consider cutting . . . everything, starting with pencils and paper.”

Until Friday, Kibala wasn’t sure she would still be working at Parmelee. She was one of several school principals warned two weeks ago they might be demoted to accommodate displaced administrators.

Now district officials say it appears no principals will be displaced after all.

A week ago, as classes let out for the summer at T.S. King Junior High in Silver Lake, parents and teachers were still fretting over whether their principal would be allowed to return next fall.

Although the principal was spared, the uncertainity attendant to the budget process this year left staff at King--and the district’s more than 500 other schools--unable to make plans for the coming semester.

“There has been a lot of anxiety over the process and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of confusion during the first few weeks this fall,” said King teacher Ed Brostoff.