New Round of School Cutbacks to Hit Harder : Education: Classrooms were spared in last year’s slashes. L.A. district board has fewer options now.

A year ago, amid much hand-wringing and gloom-and-doom predictions, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education made its deepest spending cuts in more than a decade, snatching back schools’ lottery funds, reducing custodial services and limiting the money schools could spend on such basics as pencils and paper.

For students, the cuts have meant fewer field trips and longer waits in cafeteria lunch lines, but little change in the classroom.

“Everybody’s had to work harder . . . but we’ve held it together fairly well,” said Margo Stewart, a teacher at Sierra Vista Elementary School on Los Angeles’ Eastside. “The children don’t know what they’re missing.”

Last June, the school board dealt with a $220-million budget shortfall by cutting administrative services, eliminating more than 1,000 positions--mostly on cafeteria, maintenance and clerical staffs--diverting $8 million in lottery proceeds from individual schools to the district’s general fund and cutting by 15% the amount schools could spend on classroom supplies.

Vowing to keep the cuts as far as possible from the classroom, the board targeted services such as school maintenance and playground supervision for the heaviest hits, and forced schools to eliminate what few frills they had.

“This year, we’ve (already) taken away all the things that make school interesting and fun for the kids,” said school board President Jackie Goldberg. “Next year, we’re warehousing.”

Indeed, the coming year’s picture is decidedly bleaker. Because of a sharp decline in state revenue, the district faces the prospect of cutting more than $350 million, or about 10%, from its 1991-92 budget--compounding an escalating financial crisis that has taken a heavy toll on the nation’s second-largest school system.

In the last three years, the district has been forced to cut approximately $1 billion--a cumulative cut equal to one-fourth of its annual budget.

Last year’s cuts were the most severe since Proposition 13 slashed school revenues in 1978, but they failed to result in the kinds of calamities that some parents, teachers and principals had feared. Instead, they merely exacerbated the steady erosion school services had been undergoing for years.

“A lot of schools haven’t felt the full impact yet,” said district Budget Director Henry Jones. “It may take a year for the effect of some of these cuts to start trickling down. When the calls for services start backing up and local schools start requesting things and they aren’t there, that’s when it’ll really hit them.”

At most schools, the biggest blow was the removal of lottery funds from local control. Although the amount schools received had dropped each year--from $20 per student in 1986 to $5 last year--the allotment was the largest unrestricted pool of money many schools had. Most used it to enrich their educational program with extras, such as field trips or art supplies.

“The lottery funds were like frosting on the cake for most schools,” said Marvin Starer, principal of Manual Arts High School, which would have used its $12,000 in lottery money last year to modernize its industrial arts equipment. “We had used the money to buy things we weren’t otherwise able to get. Last year, we just did without.”

At Castlebay Elementary in the northern San Fernando Valley, Principal Sarah Berry had to cut by half the amount of time aides spent helping classroom teachers. Berry had used lottery funds to hire teacher assistants, who spent three hours a day in each classroom. Now, classes have to share the aides, with each teacher getting 1 1/2 hours a day.

Western Avenue Elementary had used its lottery money to sponsor theater performances on the campus, and take its 950 students on field trips from South-Central Los Angeles to places like Castaic Lake in the rural Santa Clarita Valley.

“In the past, we’d take them to places away from the city, to show them a different kind of life,” said Principal Linda Kim. “This year, we weren’t able to do that.”

But the school did manage to assemble its own theater troupe--Kim and teachers donned costumes and did a song-and-dance version of “The Little Red Hen,” replete with warnings about drug use.

And the school’s music teacher--who has since been told by the district that she may be one of 900 teachers laid off next semester--wrangled a corporate donation to take a busload of sixth-graders to see the opera “Mikado,” to coincide with their study of Japan.

“(The cuts) forced us to do some things we wouldn’t have, and the teachers have worked very hard to find ways to make up for some of what we lost so the children wouldn’t suffer,” said Kim. “But it’s frustrating. You can have a lot of creative ideas, but you can’t create things out of dust.”

On some campuses, the responsibility for absorbing the cuts in supplies and services landed squarely on the shoulders of the students.

At Chatsworth Park Elementary, “the teachers are constantly reminding the children to take better care of their materials, their crayons, their pencils,” said Principal Anais Ruiz. “They’re not allowed to waste paper; if they make a mistake, they can’t just wad it up and throw it away.”

Because Belevedere Elementary could no longer afford to pay a library coordinator, students were taught to shelve books and help their teachers maintain the library.

Upper-grade children at Western Avenue Elementary have been enlisted to help out in the cafeteria, since the school lost one employee position because of the cuts.

And at some schools, the parents have stepped in to cushion the losses, raising money to buy supplies or rent buses for field trips.

“We had parents come every day for weeks to make Christmas ornaments” that were sold to raise $400, said Sierra Vista’s Stewart. That money, and the proceeds from a T-shirt sale, were used to pay for three field trips--down from the 10 the school usually bought with its lottery money.

“I’m really happy that the parents at our little school supported us, and getting together with them to try to overcome this felt real good,” said Stewart. “But it’s kind of sad . . . this is not a wealthy neighborhood or anything, and I’m sure people had more important things to do with their money.”

There was an irony to the cuts, in that they came in the first full year of operation for the district’s school-based management councils--teams of parents, teachers and school employees elected at each campus to oversee portions of their school budgets.

The two funds raided in the budget cuts--the lottery and instructional material accounts--are among those controlled by the local councils.

“That was very frustrating to us all,” said Judy Burton, principal of Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, who has served on her school’s council as well as the districtwide committee that oversees the shared decision-making process.

Now, said Burton, “everybody is wondering what next year is going to bring. We all recognize the fact that the state in general is in a budget crunch, so cuts are going to be made somewhere, somehow. But how much more can there possibly be to cut?

“We’ve tightened up everyplace. We’re down to bare bones right now,” she said. “We made it through this year, but now, there are no cuts that can be made that don’t hurt everyone.”