Cuts Leave Year-Round Schools in State of Chaos : Education: Classes are packed, but teachers and supplies are short. ‘We’re at gridlock,’ says a principal.

Jefferson High School Principal Phil Saldivar knew it would be difficult to arrange the four sets of schedules needed when his school went year-round this summer.

And he knew that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s budget cuts would take their toll--displacing teachers, driving class size up and reducing the money the school could spend on textbooks and supplies.

But he was hardly prepared for the scenario created by the confluence of the two: classrooms filled to overflowing, counselors’ caseloads mushrooming, students shut out of academic courses, elective courses canceled and teaching innovations derailed.

“We’ve tried to do some very creative programming, but we’re in a tight position,” Saldivar said. “We’re at gridlock. . . . Students are being squeezed out of classes because there aren’t enough teachers.”

For the second year in a row, Los Angeles schools are reeling from the effects of multimillion-dollar budget cuts that have forced them to do more with less while the district is growing by 15,000 students a year.

The district’s 200 multitrack, year-round schools were the first to feel the pinch, as their 250,000 students started a new school year this month and found familiar teachers absent and popular courses closed.

The new austerity on those campuses offers a bleak preview of what schools around the district will face when more than 360,000 children return to classes on Aug. 19, as the district goes year-round under the tightest financial constraints most teachers and administrators can recall.

“We said all along we really wouldn’t know the impact of the budget cuts until school opened,” said board member Leticia Quezada. “Well, school has opened (at some schools) and we’re seeing the crisis, the chaos the cuts have created.

“And when schools open throughout the district on Aug. 19, we’ll see total chaos.”

In the last two years, the district has cut approximately $700 million--almost 20% of its annual $3.9-billion operating budget.

Administrative and maintenance services were slashed last year. This year, individual schools will have to absorb an additional $80-million loss, through cuts that will result in more crowded classes, fewer teachers and counselors, less frequent cleaning and less money to buy classroom supplies and books.

High schools will bear the brunt of the cuts because the district has more flexibility to tinker with their staffing formulas. Effects are compounded at the district’s six largest high schools, which operate on year-round, multitrack schedules. Under the multitrack system, students are divided into three or four groups, with a group always on vacation.

“It’s very bad because year-round schools get the impact of all the cuts we’ve made, plus we’ve cut the money we had specifically earmarked to go to those schools to deal with the special difficulties of running a year-round program,” Quezada said.

Belmont High School, the district’s largest, has lost 10 teachers, shutting down some classes in home economics, business, shop and foreign languages.

Huntington Park High School stands to lose a third of its counseling staff and may have to cancel its drama program. Two physical education teachers are gone, forcing as many as 60 students into a single gym class, and courses such as art and music may not be offered on all tracks.

Classes for juniors and seniors at Bell High School will have an average of almost 40 students, a jump of more than five students for some classes.

And Jefferson High’s heralded Humanitas program--which allows small groups of teachers and students to pursue specialized lessons aimed at making education more relevant to daily life--may be a luxury the school can no longer afford.

Besieged by complaints from beleaguered teachers, principals and parents, Supt. Bill Anton is reviewing the cuts’ impact and may scale back some that deliver a double whammy to multitrack high schools. That would preserve a few teaching positions at each school, but still leave them with less money and fewer teachers than they had last year.

Almost 2,000 teaching positions were cut from junior and senior high school rolls when the school board approved adding three students to each class in grades 9 through 12, cutting back on funding for positions such as counselors and librarians, and changing the formula used to calculate the number of teachers a school will receive.

Some teachers will be reassigned to different schools and others will be laid off. In addition, many positions held by counselors, librarians, classroom aides and others will disappear.

“The major problem for all of us has not been that we’ve lost teachers, but we’ve lost positions and that means many, many things,” said Antonio Garcia, principal of Huntington Park High, which has 3,700 students attending on three tracks.

At year-round schools, principals can use some of the money they get for teaching positions to pay instructors to teach when they are scheduled to be on vacation. That way, the same courses are available throughout the year, rather than only for students whose attendance corresponds with a teacher’s on-duty track.

“The effect of the loss of positions will be in services to the kids, and that’s what’s real difficult,” Garcia said. “We have one music teacher. For that teacher to offer a program to all the students, he has to work when he’s off-track. If we can’t afford to do that, we have a problem because the students on that track are not being offered a comprehensive program.”

From his 160-person staff, Garcia expects to lose about 24 positions, including five teachers and three of the school’s nine counselors.

“Five or six teachers doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you multiply that times five periods a day and multiply that times 30 students, you’re talking about a real major effect as it spreads out,” he said.

Included among the five instructors to leave is the school’s only drama teacher. Garcia is trying to recruit a teacher on staff to take over the course, but producing student plays requires long hours on evenings and weekends, and among the items cut from school budgets was the differential paid to teachers who run extracurricular programs on their own time.

So courses such as drama, speech and journalism may become casualties of the district’s financial crisis, as could other electives, such as home economics, business, auto shop and art.

“When we make the cuts, we have to see in our program what is absolutely, basically necessary and what’s required by the state and try to meet that need first,” Garcia said. “So elective courses are the ones where cuts are likely to be made.”

At Belmont High School--one of the nation’s largest with more than 4,000 students attending its three tracks--the equivalent of 26 positions was cut from the 221-person staff, including 10 teachers spread among virtually every discipline and three of the school’s 15 counselors.

Now many classes will not be available on all tracks, “so a student needing (advanced French), which has been closed on one track, would have to come in to school when they’re on vacation to take the course,” said Principal Marta Bin.

That kind of “off-tracking” happens occasionally at most multitrack high schools, as students seek specialized courses offered only once a year. But the new austerity is bound to increase it, as more basic courses are relegated to one-track offerings.

“This is undoubtedly the worst it’s ever been,” said Jennifer Lowe, the faculty head at Garfield High School, which went year-round this summer and now stands to lose a half-dozen teachers and more than twice as many positions.

“We lost teachers and electives, we have huge classes, and there isn’t even enough money for books,” Lowe said. “People are confused and angry and upset.”

Parents of Garfield students complain that the school is so short on supplies that their children cannot bring textbooks home to study when they are off-track, during the two six-week breaks that divide the year-round calendar.

“Not only does the school not have enough money to buy textbooks for the students who are off-track, they don’t even have enough to buy textbooks for the students who are in class,” said Quezada, who attended a meeting of parents, teachers and district officials at the school this week.

Beyond the obvious toll the cuts have taken, school officials fear a more insidious kind of damage--one that threatens the future of the district’s heralded school-based management program.

“We have some exciting things going on here,” said Saldivar, who has been working with Jefferson’s teachers and parents to restructure the school to incorporate educational innovations, such as a longer school day, smaller student groupings, team teaching and interdisciplinary studies.

But the loss of teachers and scheduling options has stretched Jefferson’s program so thin that there is little time and energy for experimentation.

“It changes the focus. You lose the momentum,” said Saldivar. “You’re no longer trying to be creative. Now you’re thinking (about) how you’re going to keep the classes going and just survive. It’s changed the whole direction.”