Looking to Friends for Funds : Schools: The role of nonprofit foundations in keeping programs afloat will be more vital with Gov. Wilson’s proposed 1991-92 budget calling for $500 million in cuts.

In a classroom at Newport Heights Elementary School, fifth-graders stared at a laser-disc program and bopped to the beat of “Map Rap” during a costly, computerized audiovisual lesson that shows the growth of the United States with a rap song.

In another room, kindergartners gazed wide-eyed as their teacher showed them pictures from an oversized--and expensive--storybook.

With education budgets decreasing, due largely to the statewide budget crunch, a set of oversized books costing $840 and a $750 outlay for two laser discs are beyond the means of most school districts--including relatively well-heeled Newport-Mesa Unified.

But many school districts around Southern California are continuing to enjoy the latest in high-tech and innovative materials, thanks to nonprofit education foundations--private fund-raising groups, often established by parents to provide an infusion of funds to cash-strapped school districts.

As districts find themselves increasingly unable to afford more than just basic programs, the efforts of these organizations often provide the only means for schools to continue so-called “non-essential” electives, such as music and art classes, and to buy advanced materials. In some cases, school districts are so financially strapped that foundation funds have been used to rehire personnel lost to budget cuts.

“I think what people are seeing is that the budget crisis is going to hit everybody,” said Caroline Boitano, board president of the California Consortium of Education Foundations, which serves as an adviser to the foundations. “Even in some districts where there had been some cushion in budgeting, they’re really hitting the wall. Suburban districts are deciding whether music is in or out, rural districts are going to have to make a decision on whether to bus or buy books for the library. We’re down to the nitty-gritty here.”

Education foundations, some formed to serve individual schools, others entire districts, for the most part were born during previous fiscal crunches, including the severe education cutbacks in the 1980s that grew out of Proposition 13, approved by voters in 1979.

But as education moves into the even more austere 1990s, school districts find they are having to rely more and more on these education angels. With Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed 1991-92 budget calling for a $500-million cut to school systems in the current budget year and a $2-billion reduction over the next 18 months, the role of the foundations in keeping programs afloat will become even more vital.

“Our purpose is to enhance the quality of education, (but) with recent budget cuts, we have to now look for more than providing icing on the cake,” said Marge Schneider, executive director of the Fountain Valley Education Foundation. “We may have to start providing the cake.”

Concerns were raised early on that private-education foundations might violate the spirit of a 1978 state Supreme Court decision --Serrano vs. Priest--which held that inequitable funding of school districts is unconstitutional.

“If an individual district can go out and, not through the tax base but . . . through separate fund-raising tilt the dollars significantly in that district, then what the state was hoping to accomplish is being thwarted,” Boitano said.

Foundation executives throughout the state, however, discounted the notion that foundations in wealthy communities are widening the gap in quality of education, since no foundation raises enough money to significantly influence a district’s budget, even in the more-affluent districts.

But the fact that foundation funds skew budgets at all--effectively circumventing Serrano-Priest--presents “a moral dilemma,” said Lewis Solmon, dean of the Graduate School of Education at UCLA.

“This is a way of getting around equal funding across districts,” Solmon said. “ . . . But should everybody be able to have only what the lowest-budgeted district could have? I think that’s a value judgement.”

Overall, Solmon said, foundations are effective because parents in poor and wealthy districts alike are likely to donate as much as they can to benefit their children’s education. Since some less affluent children attend schools in wealthy areas, at least they can benefit from the foundations’ work.

“One has to assess whether the fallout opportunity for poor kids is greater in wealthy districts,” he said.

Statewide, there are about 150 foundations. They raise, on average, from $25,000 to $200,000 annually, which is donated either directly to school districts or allocated for specific programs.

School districts and foundation executives don’t see private donations as a way to balance budgets. Funds raised by most foundations, although considered a significant amount, are not enough to make a dent in $100-million budgets.

“It’s a drop in the bucket, but it helps,” said Diana Long, president of the Newport-Mesa Schools Foundation, which raised about $40,000 for the current school year. “We’re basically augmenting programs that currently exist. We’re giving the frosting on the cake in a lot of ways.”

Boitano said that perhaps a more important mission of the foundations is to get the word out to communities that schools are suffering and need help, whether it be donations, gifts in kind or volunteers.

“Whether it’s a school foundation or a PTA, really the function is to broaden support for public education,” Boitano said. “When you do that, you’re taking stories back into the community, telling them that we need additional ways to get money.”

As the foundations slowly proved their ability to raise money, many started “mini-grant” programs, in which teachers submit grant applications for small-scale projects.

Among those projects is the computerized “Map Rap,” one of 120 lessons about history and geography contained on two laser discs, which Dana Aguilera uses in her class at Newport Heights.

Long, of the Newport-Mesa foundation, said the mini-grant system was devised as a means of fairly distributing donations among schools in the district, which last year totaled about $50,000. But officials of other foundations prefer to grant a lump sum to the district and let officials decide which needs are most pressing.

“We don’t make a decision on how it’s spent,” said Lucinda Prewitt, past president of the School Power foundation in Laguna Beach, which contributed $200,000 to the Laguna Beach Unified School District last year. “But we ask that the money is used for enhancing programs rather than for basic programs.”

Another consideration, Boitano said, is that parents and other contributors often like to see exactly how their donations are being used. Contributors who are not connected to schools need to be shown “the efficacy of the project that you’re raising money for” in order for foundations to gain widespread community support, she said.

“You have to convince them that they need to make a bigger investment in schools and that (a donation) does have some pay-back--it’s that linkage back into the larger community that’s important,” Boitano said.