Huge Bond Issue Would Bring Relief to Crowded Schools Throughout State : Education: Prop. 146, the $800-million measure, would create more classrooms. But supporters fear that disenchantment over borrowing could doom the initiative.

In this small city 35 miles south of Sacramento, known for its zinfandel grapes and its pleasant way of life, you can catch a glimpse of the school overcrowding that is plaguing much of California.

The Lodi Unified School District has built five new schools and made four major additions in the last eight years, has two more under construction and another dozen on the drawing board. Yet the district has been hit with such an onslaught of new students that 90% of its schools are on a year-round calendar and there is even talk of moving to the first year-round, double-session plan in the state.

This gives Lodi a special interest in the $800-million school construction bond issue, Proposition 146, that will be on the Nov. 6. ballot.

Passage of the measure could mean new facilities for overcrowded districts statewide, including two new schools in Lodi. It also would mean additional long-term debt for taxpayers, opponents say, at a time when the state has become more aggressive in issuing bonds to pay for projects once financed directly from the state treasury.

Since November, 1988, California voters have approved $3.2 billion in school construction bonds, yet overcrowding grows worse.

The main reason is the staggering enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grades, due to sharp increases in both birth rates and new people moving into the state.

New projections from the state Department of Finance predict an average annual increase of 230,000 public school students over the next five years. By 1994 statewide enrollment, now 4.8 million, will rise to 5.8 million. By 1999 it will be almost 7 million.

Lyle Smoot, executive secretary of the State Allocation Board, which approves local school district construction requests, said the backlog of approved projects for which no construction money is available “is approaching $6.5 billion.”

DuWayne Brooks, assistant superintendent of public instruction for school facilities planning, said about $900 million worth of these projects are “ready to go,” pending bond issue approval.

But backers of Proposition 146 are worried because voter approval of school bonds has been dropping with each election--from 65% in June, 1988, to 61% in November, 1988, to 57.5% last June.

And only about $25,000 will be available to run the statewide campaign, according to Peter Birdsall, whose Sacramento public relations firm is handling the “Yes on 146” effort.

Opponents of the measure argue that the state is depending too much on bonds, requiring huge annual debt payments that take money away from other state services.

State funds, they say, should go not to school districts but to individual parents, who could then spend the money on either a public or private education.

The ballot argument against Proposition 146, signed by William McCord, president of Citizens United on Taxes of Alameda County, also urges more year-round schools, more family planning and “restriction of immigration by using the U.S. Army to patrol our borders and stop the flood of illegal aliens.”

Army border patrols would not be much help in Lodi, where schools are filling not with illegal aliens but with the children of families who have fled the high-priced San Francisco Bay Area in search of affordable housing and with refugees from Southeast Asia.

Most of the new pupils in the Lodi Unified School District live in North Stockton, where thousands of residential units have been built in recent years and thousands more are planned. “They’re mapping the world out there,” said Mary Joan (Mamie) Starr, Lodi’s chief facility planner.

The crowding problem was aggravated in the 1970s when Stockton began busing children for desegregation purposes, sending many white families fleeing north to the Lodi schools.

Lodi has tried just about everything to handle the student surge.

Portable classrooms (Starr called them “permanent relocatables”) dot almost every school site. Buses carry about 1,000 of Lodi’s 24,000 pupils from jam-packed schools to those that still have space. For several years, the district even operated an elementary school in a series of duplex apartments. The pupil-teacher ratio is 31-to-1, high compared to other states.

There is no money for a new continuation high school--or for discipline cases and other students who are not successful in mainstream classes--so those classes are held in a huge bus called the “Gray Whale,” which stops here and there to offer instruction. Like a baseball manager in the minor leagues, the teacher must be able to drive the bus.

Still, the surge continues. District officials estimate enrollment will be 28,000 in 1992 and 37,000 by the year 2000.

Lodi’s overcrowding headaches are shared by many other school districts.

In Los Angeles, 200,000 students, about one-third of K-12 enrollment, is on a year-round calendar. In search of available seats, almost 20,000 are bused from one part of the district to another. Enrollment jumped by 15,000 last year and this year’s increase, when official numbers are released next month, probably will be higher.

Unlike Lodi, much of the growth in Los Angeles has been due to increased immigration.

Gail Corcoran, of the state Department of Finance population unit, said both factors were underestimated when the department projected school enrollments a year ago. Most of the difference was in Los Angeles County, she said. Bonnie James, chief facilities planner for the Los Angeles schools, said the district needs about $2 billion worth of new schools or additions to accommodate expected enrollment.

In Fontana, where new housing developments have been built at a rapid pace, 27,000 students are housed in facilities designed for 18,000, said Jane Smith, assistant superintendent for instruction.

More than 80 portable classrooms stand on what once was the Fontana High School parking lot, Smith said. Last year the district even turned to “triple sessions” for a couple of months to handle a severe overcrowding problem in one area.

If California voters decide to reject bond issues as a way of paying for new schools, are there other options?

Some school districts have persuaded developers to pay fees that are higher than state law allows in order to build new facilities.

In Elk Grove, a fast-growing Sacramento suburb, developer fees have been raised from $3,000 to $5,000 on a typical 1,900-square-foot home. The increased fees will generate an estimated $54 million, to help build 19 schools by 1996, but that will leave the district far short of the total needed to handle anticipated enrollment.

Several tries have been made in the Legislature to permit school districts to approve construction bonds by a majority popular vote, instead of the two-thirds approval required since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, but all have failed.

There have been legislative attempts to pass a sales tax increase that could be used only for school construction, but those efforts also have failed.

BACKGROUND

Altogether, there are more than a dozen bond-funding measures totaling $5.8 billion on California’s Nov. 6 ballot. Besides education, the measures include money for crime fighting, prison and jail construction, veteran benefits and housing, water, park, forest, courthouse and child-care projects.