State Auditors to Investigate Dual Enrollment Procedure : Education: Analysts say state is paying twice for some students. Montebello school officials say their policy is entirely legal.

State auditors plan to investigate the Montebello Unified School District over alleged irregularities in funding for the district’s adult school, officials said last week.

State officials said they are concerned about a surge in the number of school-age students who are enrolled in the district’s adult program and regular classes at the same time. In 1989, these dual enrollments rose 39% to 5,735, according to state records.

Analysts with the state Department of Finance said the state is paying Montebello and a number of other districts twice for educating the same students. They question whether Montebello is entitled to this money, estimated to be more than $2 million a year.

Montebello school officials said their registration practices are entirely within the law. The district uses the money to provide special classes for dually enrolled students, they said.

Losing the money would add to the district’s financial burdens. The district ranks near the top of the controller’s list of school systems most likely to become insolvent. To balance the books, officials already have slashed $26.7 million, about 21%, from the budget and laid off about 145 employees, most of them teachers. On Thursday, the board reviewed a list of more than 30 additional layoffs of non-teaching employees.

The controversy is over how and when students can enroll in regular classes and adult classes at the same time. Students can take adult school courses to make up classes they flunked and to study subjects that are not available to them in the regular curriculum, said James Lindberg, an adult education consultant with the California Department of Education.

Students must have a full schedule of regular classes before they can add adult school courses. Hundreds of school districts do not even offer adult school courses to regular students during the school day, officials of the Department of Finance said.

In Montebello, at least 4,000 seventh- through 12th-graders are taking adult school courses during their regular school day. These include required courses that students would have to take whether they were paid for by the adult school or not. The district pays the salaries of about 50 full-time junior and high school teachers through the adult school.

In the view of Department of Finance officials, such practices allow a district to get paid twice by the state for the same student--once from the children’s education fund and once from adult school monies.

“What a number of districts are doing is putting students into a course during the regular school day, classifying it as an adult education course and collecting two apportionments for that student,” said John Lloyd, an analyst with the Department of Finance. “Our interest is strictly one of: Is the money being used the way it was intended? In our view (these districts) are outside the intent of the law.”

Montebello officials disagreed and said they take pride in what their program has accomplished. As recently as March, state evaluators heaped praise on Montebello. They commended the district for using its adult school to help students who were in danger of dropping out or who needed a different pace or type of instruction.

The purpose is to “help the at-risk student be successful, to gain an education, to keep them from dropping out,” said Jeffrey Schwartz, principal of the Montebello Adult School. “That’s what we’re here for.”

Schwartz defined at-risk students as those with poor test scores or a limited ability to speak English, as well as students from poor or single-parent families.

Montebello guidance counselors have the job of identifying at-risk students. The students are then placed in classes with similar students. Those classes, whether the subject be math, English, science, ceramics, chorus or health, can then be classified as adult education courses and paid for through the adult school, Montebello officials said.

At the beginning of the year, teachers give students in these classes cards for their parents to sign and return. These are the enrollment forms for the adult school. Unless the students question the purpose of the forms, they may never know they are part of the adult school. To them, the class appears no different than any other science or social studies class.

Montebello administrators said this process prevents the students from feeling segregated. Having the classes during the school day also allows the district to give students extra help without having to arrange transportation to and from a school site outside of school hours.

Montebello is not the only district to offer adult education to students during the regular school day. Other area districts with similar registration practices include ABC Unified, Downey Unified, Whittier Union and Hacienda-La Puente Unified.

The difference is one of scope.

Montebello Unified is the 12th largest school district in the state, but has the second largest dual enrollment income, according to state figures. Only Los Angeles Unified has a larger claim. Los Angeles receives about 2.5 times as much as Montebello, but the Los Angeles district also has 19 times as many students.

Some districts, including Long Beach Unified, interpret adult education funding rules far more conservatively. All Long Beach adult school classes must be open to adults, even if they are offered at the high school during school hours, said Gary Bos, head counselor of the Long Beach School for Adults. And district teachers are only allowed to teach adult school classes outside of their normal contract time.

Long Beach, with more than 75,000 students, had 811 students who were enrolled in the adult school last year, less than one-fifth the number in Montebello.

Department of Finance officials said they are concerned with the issue of fairness. The Legislature has said that school districts cannot increase their dual enrollment over what it was in 1989-90. At the time, 776 school districts did not have any students enrolled in adult schools. As a result, they will never receive money from this funding source.

“It’s a question of whether you allow a few districts to take advantage of a loophole in existing law and receive additional money that would otherwise be available for all districts,” Lloyd said.

The Department of Education has used the results of audits to remove adult education money recently from two Northern California school districts. Richmond Unified lost money because it used adult school money to pay the salaries of 40 high school teachers, the department’s Lindberg said. Fresno Unified had to pay the state back as a result of infractions in its adult education program.

If Montebello lost its money the results would be disastrous, Principal Schwartz said. Students with special needs “would be stuck in the mainstream and fail when they couldn’t cope with the peer pressure of being behind. Our dropout rate would soar tremendously,” he said.

“Their argument is strictly financial,” Schwartz said of the Department of Finance. “Our reason for going into this is to help the student. I think our point of view is a lot better. They are just looking at the dollars.”

To ease the potential loss of adult education funds, Acting Business Manager Glenn Sheppard has advised the district to begin cutting back on its dual enrollments. But he did not condemn past administrators who began the practice.

“We found a way to service children,” he said. “So we’ve gone in that direction. It’s been beneficial to our students. Is that wrong? The law permits us to do it. We looked for every way in which we could serve kids.”