Empty Seats Mark Early Start of L. A. School Year : Education: Some confusion accompanies the first day of classes with most students on a new academic calendar. Budget cuts add to the uneasiness.

Running a practiced eye over Audubon Junior High School’s cafeteria area at mid-morning break, Principal David Van Putten understood why he had seen so many empty seats in classrooms on the first day of school.

“We were expecting 1,800 students--there can’t be more than 1,200 here,” Van Putten said Monday.

As the Los Angeles Unified School District’s academic year opened with a new calendar that eliminates the traditional long summer vacation, it was clear that many students had not heard the school bell.

For the majority of the district’s 625,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, classes started almost a month earlier than usual. About 360,000 students--those not already attending district schools that operate year-round to relieve overcrowding--were expected, although many did not show up.

In addition, schools had to cope with the effects of the district’s worst budget crisis in history. Some teachers reported for duty not knowing whether they had a job or where, while others braced for the big classes that are sure to come.

While the no-shows--along with unseasonably cool weather--may have helped ease the first-day tumult for the financially strapped district, officials were not kidding themselves about what lies ahead.

“I hope people don’t confuse what seemed to be an easy opening of school with thinking everything is in place. Everything is not in place,” said Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles. Bernstein said the district’s move to a new school calendar has only aggravated the fiscal crisis because the district does not get state funds for students who are not in attendance.

After cutting $241 million from this year’s $4-billion budget, the Board of Education last week was forced to chop another $33 million. It did so by eliminating more than 800 teachers’ jobs, triggering class size increases that will put up to 34 students in elementary classrooms and 36 in junior high classes. (High school class sizes were increased in earlier budget sessions.)

Last-minute cuts forced schools to scramble to redo schedules. When some teachers returned to work Friday, Bernstein said, they found their classroom materials packed hastily into cardboard boxes and were told there was no longer a place for them on the school roster.

District officials took no school-by-school enrollment tally on Monday but said spot checks found attendance to be “near normal” at some schools and “under normal” at others. It usually takes a month or so for enrollments to stabilize.

While several schools came up short Monday, others, including Cabrillo Elementary in San Pedro, were already full and planning where to bus extra students.

Schools that do not get the anticipated numbers of students by Sept. 20, the district’s date for setting official enrollment, will lose teachers to more populous campuses.

“The numbers we have now are totally misleading . . . the deluge won’t hit for another month or so,” said Joe Niedelman, a math teacher at James Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley, where only about two-thirds of the expected 2,450 students had shown up by noon.

At Jefferson High School, an inner-city school that has had success recently in getting more of its youngsters interested in and ready for college, the new staggered schedule, in which students are divided into four tracks, was causing some worry. Jefferson has been put into a system in which students are divided into four groups, or tracks, with one of the groups on vacation at all times.

“We cannot offer a full (college preparatory) curriculum on all the tracks, and we’re very concerned about access to these courses,” said science teacher Roland Ganges. Ganges found there were 78 students scheduled in one of his chemistry classes.

Some schools had lots to contend with. Gardena High School, for example, recently got a new principal, added one of the district’s five new specialty, or “magnet,” schools and enrolled ninth-graders for the first time on Monday. At the same time, the school lost nine teaching positions to budget cuts, which also left only four counselors to serve the school’s 2,700 students.

Principal Catherine Lam said many teachers--already facing bigger classes--have pitched in to oversee the drill team, school band and the year book without any extra pay. The fate of several other activities remains up in the air, however.

At Audubon, Principal Van Putten already figured to lose four of his 71 teachers but wants to wait to see what happens with enrollment before deciding to dispatch anyone.

“We have had very little turnover in our teaching staff the last few years, and that has given us a stability and a continuity which are very important to students at this age,” he said.

Van Putten had not counted on Jerry Stevens. Stevens, a social studies teacher at Sylmar High School last year, lost his position in the first round of budget-cutting this summer. He was told to report to Audubon, but there was nothing for him to do Monday morning except help keep order among new students quietly waiting to register in the auditorium.

“I imagine it will be a few weeks before I’m settled in somewhere,” Stevens said. “It’s frustrating, but when you work for this district in these times, you have to learn to be flexible. I’ve come with a full set of lesson plans today, just in case.”

Many parents seemed largely unaware of the looming budget cuts but had opinions on the new calendar.

Mary Thompson, mother of a second grader at Carson Elementary, said her daughter was “getting bored at home . . . she is glad to be back.”

But Lynn Reed found her two daughters--one at Gardena High and the other at Henry Clay Junior High--are on separate schedules.

“I don’t like it at all,” she said of the disruption to family vacation and other schedules.

But parent Marika Gerrard-Tur said she was pleased with how things went at Palisades Elementary School for her children, Katie, 7, and Jamie, 5. She acknowledged, however, that she was concerned about the future.

“I support the public schools,” Gerrard-Tur said, “and they’d improve if more of us” helped them.

Meanwhile, several special programs aimed at some of the district’s most troubled and lowest-achieving students are still on the chopping block after a school board meeting Monday.

The board is considering cutting $1 million in special services for low-achieving children and their families and $1.4 million budgeted to hire physicians to examine and refer sick children to community clinics.

The board may also cut a 3-year-old program to counsel failing junior high students, although that recommendation from the superintendent encountered heavy opposition from several board members.

Times staff writers Sandy Banks, Aaron Curtiss, Kim Kowsky and Lois Timnick contributed to this story.