Special Music and Reading Programs Fall to Budget Ax : Education: Defeat last year of Wiseburn District’s property tax measure forces the cancellations. Three teachers will be reassigned.

The remedial reading and instrumental music programs at the Wiseburn School District’s three elementary schools have been cut because of budget shortfalls after the defeat last year of a proposed parcel tax that would have generated about $350,000 annually.

Two reading specialists and the district’s music teacher will be reassigned to regular classes, said Alice Blyther, a special education teacher and president of the Wiseburn Faculty Assn. At the same time, two recently hired teachers--a seventh-grade teacher at Richard Henry Dana School and a kindergarten and first-grade teacher at Juan Cabrillo School--received layoff notices, Blyther said.

Supt. Clinton Boutwell was not available for comment, and other district officials could not be reached Thursday.

Several parents and teachers said the loss of the remedial reading program would be particularly painful because the district has a rising number of immigrant children who are still learning English. Some said that children whose families cannot afford private music lessons will lose an important creative outlet.

“No one wants it to happen obviously, because we don’t feel it’s in the best interest of the children,” said Elaine Allen, who has a 7-year-old daughter at Juan Cabrillo School and serves as president of its parent-teacher group. “To me, it is a blow.”

Juan Cabrillo reading specialist Jacqui Hook, who has been with the district three years, said her reassignment will mean that about 60 remedial students no longer will receive special help in reading. Instead, those students will be forced to cope in classrooms with children who have more advanced reading skills.

“Teachers are mostly upset about this because they’ve got a lot more of a load on their shoulders now,” said Hook, who has not yet been told what her new assignment will be. “And parents are outraged because they can’t get services for their kids that they’ve gotten for years and years.”

Layoffs and reassignments are not new to the district. Last year, two teachers with the gifted and talented program and the computer coordinator were reassigned to regular classrooms, Blyther said. District officials have still not replaced a teacher of English as a second language who retired last year.

“I think the teachers feel very much overburdened, overworked and the morale has not been as good as it has been in the past,” Blyther said.

The teachers, whose three-year contract with the district expired in June, 1990, have been working without a contract, Blyther said. They have asked the district for a 12% raise, some of it in the form of health benefits, but the district’s counteroffer has not yet addressed wages.

The Wiseburn School District, which serves an exclusive, single-family neighborhood in Hawthorne and a small part of Los Angeles County, has seen enrollment decline by nearly half in the last several years to 1,300 students, mostly because younger families with children cannot afford local housing prices, which start in the $250,000 range.

In recent years the district, which has a $5.1-million budget, has survived financially because the state gave it permission to use a portion of the proceeds from the 1987 sale of Smith Elementary School for operating costs. As the fund became depleted, the district considered new ways to generate income.

Last year, the district came up with Proposition X, a measure that would have raised homeowners’ taxes by up to $100 a year to pay for special school programs. Although the measure had the support of the schools’ parent-teacher associations, it failed at the polls by a wide margin, winning the approval of only 55% of the voters. It needed the support of two-thirds to pass.