SCHOOLS IN CRISIS : GRIM DAYS AT GRANT HIGH : FIGHTS, ABSENTEEISM AND RESENTMENT ARE INCREASING, AND LEARNING IS SUFFERING, AS A ONCE-PROUD SCHOOL DEALS WITH RELENTLESS BUDGET CUTS

The rustling of musical scores stops in the band room at Grant High School as the teacher mounts the conductor’s podium. Jason Rodriguez begins barking out staccato commands to the 18 students seated in a semicircle around him. “You’re flat!” he yells at a young girl puffing into a flute. He is glaring at her and waving his arms, as if he could physically lift the note up to the correct pitch.

“Stop!” he screams, his face reddening with outrage at an off-key rendition of the school fight song. “What was that supposed to be?” He glowers at the students, who begin fidgeting with their instruments. In the silence, his scream seems to hang in the air. When he raises his arms and the music begins again, it’s in perfect tune.

The students’ eyes are riveted on him as he strides around the classroom, leaning in close to listen to one musician after another. It’s a slightly peculiar sight: One of the straps of his denim overalls is dangling near his knees and a gold hoop earring adorns his left ear. He looks barely as old as the students he is leading . . . not surprising, considering that the teacher, a high school senior, is only 17.

When the school year ended last June, the Los Angeles School Board announced plans to lay off thousands of teachers to save money for the cash-strapped system and Grant High seemed destined to join dozens of other schools that had been forced to jettison music programs. But a makeshift deal that relied on a principal’s inspiration and a student’s spunk saved Grant’s Lancer Marching Band: Jason, the drum major for the band last year, was shoved to the head of the class this fall when his teacher was let go, a testament to the notion that hard times can encourage initiative as surely as they breed despair.

His students oscillate between awe and resentment of him, grudgingly grateful for his dictatorial leadership. “It was a real shock to them at first to come in here and see a student in charge,” Jason says modestly. “But they accepted it, because they want to play the music and this is the only way we have to survive.”

Other music programs at the school that spawned such talents as saxophonist Tom Scott, rock band Toto and Monkee Mickey Dolenz were not so fortunate. Choral teacher Marsha Taylor was able to squeeze a few orchestra members into her piano class and she gave up her free period to teach a beginning instrumental course. But the school’s acclaimed jazz band folded without a teacher, and the chorus had to pare its concert schedule.

At 600 schools spread across the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, painful spending cuts are reshaping priorities and reducing choices, transforming the effort to teach and to learn into a struggle merely to survive. From affluent coastline communities to impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, the fiscal crisis gripping city schools has embittered teachers who were forced to take pay cuts and alienated children trapped in classes that are among the largest in the nation.

While politicians in Sacramento and Washington debate reformist concepts such as “choice” and “accountability,” and self-described “Education President” George Bush touts standardized testing and a sprinkling of “model schools,” funding cutbacks are turning classroom basics--books, art supplies and science equipment--into luxuries.

Moreover, a national wave of school-management reforms that, a few short years ago, promised to transform public education by unleashing the creativity of teachers has come to a screeching halt. The realities of schools at the breaking point show up in small ways: boys and girls forced to share bathrooms, overworked janitors calling in sick due to stress, teachers assigning less homework--and students who wonder how important education is, after all, if the collective will to fund it adequately doesn’t exist.

Squeezed between rising costs and shrinking state funding, the Los Angeles Unified School District has had to cut its spending by 15%, or more than $630 million, in the last three years. During that time, enrollment has mushroomed by more than 45,000 new students. More than 75% of the $3.9 billion the district spends annually comes from the state, which allocates to Los Angeles about $3,200 per student, and funds special programs for year-round schools, gifted students and handicapped children. But last year the state had to grapple with its own $14.9-billion deficit, so education spending was pared down and across-the-board cost-of-living increases virtually eliminated. State lottery revenues fell as well, leaving the Los Angeles Unified School District facing a $275-million shortfall last summer.

The school board had already reduced administrative spending, borrowed from its construction accounts, cut custodial services and dipped into its insurance reserves to narrow the budget gap, before it voted this summer on cuts. There were bitter arguments and tears among board members as they slogged through what board President Warren Furutani termed “the ugly zone” of painful cuts. Ultimately, almost 2,000 teachers were laid off, hundreds of courses were eliminated and the remaining classes were crammed with additional students, and spending on such basic supplies as textbooks, pencils and paper was curtailed. Some critics blame the district for its own problems, charging that employee salaries (teachers make, on average, $43,000 a year) have increased disproportionately to state funding. And now, for schools that have just barely managed to accommodate the cuts, there’s the dire prospect of more budget cuts to come this spring.

Public schools around the country have been caught in the same sort of budget vise. Here, in the nation’s second-largest school system, the problems are compounded by the ceaseless needs of its students. Almost one-third of the district’s 640,000 students come to school speaking little or no English. More than 60% come from families so poor that they qualify for free school lunches. One in three drops out before graduating from high school.

“We’re basing our funding of public schools on a concept that hardly exists anymore--the middle-class home where the kids are well taken care of, daddy works and mommy stays home, they have a family doctor and summer camp and music lessons and help with their homework,” says Roberta Weintraub, who represents the East San Fernando Valley on the school board. “We have to wake up and realize these are kids of poverty, and they need so much more than we’re able to give.”

IN MANY WAYS, ULYSSES S. GRANT HIGH SCHOOL IS A MICROCOSM of the district--its successes, its failures, and the changes that have pushed the once-proud system into a relentless slide toward mediocrity.

The sprawling campus sits alongside a flood-control channel near the point where Van Nuys, North Hollywood and Sherman Oaks converge. Its 39 acres are spread over a city block, across the street from Valley College--the next stop for hundreds of Grant’s graduates. With its expansive athletic fields and verdant grounds, Grant’s web of problems is not noticeable at first glance. The grassy quad is ringed by stately evergreens, and flowers grace the fronts of the half-dozen classroom buildings, which have served as backdrops for countless movies. Rows of trailers take up a corner of the parking lot, serving as bungalow classrooms to handle the overflow of a growing population. There are an outdoor patio that serves as a lunchroom, and a brick bandstand where students play music and school clubs hawk their wares. From Grant’s opening day in 1959, teachers clamored to work at the school, which drew its students from the homes of doctors, lawyers and schoolteachers in the surrounding upper- and middle-class neighborhoods. “This was the premier school of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” declares Dan Gruenberg, the dean of students, who began teaching at the school 28 years ago. “It used to be a selling point for realtors.”

But much has changed since then. There was a shooting last year in front of nearby Millikan Junior High in Sherman Oaks, and fights erupt occasionally on the Grant campus--sometimes sparked by gang rivalries, more often by squabbles arising from an inevitable clash of many cultures. Evidence of the tension that underlies even the most innocent interactions can be seen in the lunchtime cliques. White students lounge on the grassy median; blacks gather along the one wall. Asians sit cross-legged, books open, outside the library. A circle of Armenians rings a tree. The tables on the patio are filled with Latinos. This is education Los Angeles-style in 1991.

“It’s a fact of life all over the district these days,” says Gruenberg, who must discipline the combatants. “There’s a lot of hostility among the kids, and not a lot of understanding.”

With 3,200 pupils, Grant is among the district’s largest schools and one of the most diverse. Half of its students are from Mexico or Central America. About one-third are white, 10% Asian-American and 10% black. A majority are recent immigrants--from 50 different countries around the world--and only one-third come from homes where English is the primary language. Thirteen-hundred students arrive by bus each day from the polyglot neighborhoods around Belmont High, near downtown, because it has no room for them. “Now, you’ve got this mostly white, middle-aged faculty and these young immigrant or minority kids, and we’re not able to bridge that gap,” Gruenberg says.

Gert Wossner remembers sharing “medieval literature, Chaucer, the Romantics” with his students. Today, he says mournfully, “I’m facing kids who can barely speak English. There’s no audience for what you have to teach anymore.”

Like many of Grant’s veteran teachers, Wossner often invokes the memory of the school’s glory days, when it was mostly middle-class and Jewish. “We used to send whole platoons of National Merit scholars to Ivy League schools,” he says wistfully. “I don’t know when the last time was we sent anybody to Harvard.”

“Some of these kids come to us with bullet holes from their own countries,” Gruenberg says. “I can remember when if you had 29 kids in a writing class, that was really stretching it. Now you have 40 kids, from all over the world, with problems you can hardly comprehend, and you’re expected to carry on just like nothing’s changed.”

PERCHED BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A MOTORIZED CART THAT SPUTters along the campus, wearing a bright orange T-shirt with a walkie-talkie strapped to his belt, Robert J. Collins looks more like a football coach than the school principal he is. He brings the cart to a screeching halt and bellows at a young man who has just tossed a milk carton on the grass.

“You know better than that,” he says, his tone genial but his voice loud enough to serve notice to the students lounging nearby. Sheepishly, the offender picks up the carton and deposits it in a nearby trash barrel.

“Much better,” Collins beams, and resumes his patrol.

Several times during the 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day, Collins, 45, and his four assistant principals, walkie-talkies in hand, fan out around the campus on “supervision”--the peacekeeping task that has fallen to administrators since teachers negotiated it out of their contract. It’s a ritual the back-slapping Collins seems to relish--but then, there is not much about Bob Collins’ job that he doesn’t seem to enjoy.

Tall and broad-shouldered, Collins, a former high school athlete, has been at Grant’s helm since 1983. He is its most enthusiastic cheerleader, a perennially upbeat man who dons the school colors--orange and brown--every Friday. Three years ago, he was voted the state’s principal of the year, and though a teachers’ strike the next year soured relations between him and his staff, even his critics say he has worked to mend fences and rebuild the school’s team spirit.

But these days, Collins has the feeling he and his staff are holding their school together with string and baling wire. When the district reduced the amount schools could spend on classroom equipment this year, Grant had to trim its supply budget by $25,000--cutting one-quarter of the $100,000 it had earmarked for basics, such as paper and books. The school’s $31,000 lottery allotment and the $10,000 in state integration funds that helped pay for a counselor for bused-in students also have been diverted to the district’s general fund. “At times, it’s overwhelming,” Collins admits, allowing his guard to drop momentarily. “I’m afraid we’ve lost the ability to make a difference for those students who need help the most. I don’t know when I’ve seen us sink so low.”

The losses have forced science teachers to cancel experiments because they can no longer afford chemicals. The chorus teacher must rely on rummage sales to buy sheet music. And the sewing teacher has been reduced to begging for donated fabric. Across the board, the cuts have forced Grant’s teachers to make choices about what their students will do without--reducing educational decisions to questions of dollars and cents.

“There was a time I could select the novels my class would read, based on their interests and what they needed to learn,” says English teacher Sandra Okura. “Now I have to take whatever book I can get enough copies of.”

She was lucky this semester. She found enough copies of “The Scarlet Letter” for all her American literature students. But a few weeks into the term, the paperback books began falling apart. As pages fell out, students were forced to share their books or patch them together with paper clips and masking tape. “It’s difficult enough for some of them to get through (a book) when it’s all there,” Okura says. “Sometimes it’s the small things like this that make all the difference to a student.”

And to the teachers. Two years ago, each science teacher got $100 to replenish supplies over the course of the school year--test tubes that were broken, chemicals that spilled. Now they each get only $40--barely enough to buy one box of beakers. So, many teachers no longer let their students take books home. Instead, homework is done during class or sent home on Xeroxed sheets--if the teacher had the foresight to stash copy paper before the meager supply ran out.

“(The cuts are) not in the best interests of the students and it’s terribly frustrating for the teachers,” says biology teacher Oleetha Arnold, the teachers’ union liaison on campus. “You have to keep dipping into your own pocket to provide things that the district should provide, or you cancel a lesson and the students pay the price.”

GRANT MATH TEACHER MEENA RAO LOOKS OUT AT THE 40 STUdents hunched over their books in her geometry class and laughs wryly at the thought of teaching a class half as full. Veterans talk of 10 years ago, when basic math classes were limited to 25 students. But Rao, a teacher for only four years, cannot remember when classes held fewer than 35 students. “I thought last year was difficult, but this year. . . .” She shakes her head wearily.

Like most math teachers, she has felt pressure from the district to bring up math scores. But, instead, the budget crunch has left her struggling to keep her students from falling further behind. “I don’t know what is expected of us anymore,” Rao, 39, laments. “When you put 20% more kids in a class, there’s no way you’re going to see us improve or even hold steady.” She began the semester with more than 50 students in some of her classes. “They were sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls,” Rao recalls. For weeks, there were not enough desks or chairs or books.

More than 20 of Grant’s teachers have jumped ship this year, most of them opting to retire rather than struggle with the twin afflictions of burgeoning classes and dwindling supplies. The departures were a mixed blessing for Collins. They spared him the task that fell to most high school principals this year--that of axing their newest teachers to comply with board-mandated staff reductions. But they left some of Grant’s busiest departments, such as math and science, with gaping holes. Grant had to eliminate some music courses and its driver training program--here, in a community that revolves around the car--and cut the Armenian-language class popular with 300 students, but most courses survived. With student rosters adjusted to keep classes close to the 40-student average set by the district, and about 400 students absent every day (half of whom will not show up again), many teachers still have courses with 45 pupils--levels unseen since the 1960s, when some schools were forced to hold classes in half-day shifts.

Most recent research demonstrates that, although smaller classes produce higher student achievement, significant gains come only when classes are 20 pupils or fewer. But teachers have no doubts that larger classes mean students learn less.

“When you have so many students in a class,” Rao says, “the whole dynamic is changed. It cuts into your teaching time because everything takes longer--taking attendance, grading papers. You know you can’t get to everyone who needs your help, so you’re reduced to just doing your best and hoping the students get it.”

But if Rao is frustrated, she hides it well. By the time the bell rings signaling the start of class, her students are seated and at work, copying from a blackboard covered with geometric figures and mathematical equations. Rao swiftly takes attendance, then begins a lesson on quadrilaterals and parallelograms. She has to turn sideways to squeeze between the rows of desks wedged into the bungalow classroom.

Five years ago, Rao was working for an insurance company, training new employees to use computers. She was astounded at their lack of proficiency in math, but four years into her teaching career, she understands why. For many, if not most, of her students, the 50 minutes they spend in her class each day is the only time they think about the math concepts that Rao tries to hammer home. Some of them rarely hand in homework assignments--they work after school or take care of younger siblings. Or they just don’t care.

“I try to make every minute count . . . but when you have so many children to teach at once, you cannot always know who needs help, who is ready to move on, who could make it if only you had a little extra time to spend.” It is difficult for students to concentrate in the room with 45 classmates. Rao’s lessons are sprinkled with admonitions, as she shushes noisy students, tells this one to lift her head up from her desk and that one to open his book to the correct page.

At home each night, she spends two hours or more grading homework and the weekly quizzes she gives to each of her 200 students. “Last semester, two hours a night meant I could finish it all and pass it back to the students the next day,” she says, gloomily. “This year, I never finish.”

“You scale back, even if not in a conscious way,” admits Gert Wossner, 55, who heads the English department. He has stopped asking for essays from each student each week, relying instead on quizzes and vocabulary drills.

And students, sensing their teachers’ withdrawal, say they too, have cut back on the effort they expend. They complain that their teachers are less helpful this year--that they are impatient and short-tempered, unwilling to take extra time to answer a question. Rather than fight for attention, many students just give up.

“You can’t just sit in class anymore and expect a teacher to teach you,” says Aimee Gross, an 11th-grader who wants to get into a good private college. “It requires more of the student now to get a good education, and most students aren’t going to put forth the extra effort. It makes you wonder how many educations are being discounted, how many kids are going to be lost. It’s like they’re falling down this giant hole, and I don’t know how we ever will make up the difference.”

SOME DAYS, THE LINE OF STUDENT TROUBLEMAKERS DISPATCHED to Dean Tony Lovecchio’s office stretches out the door, to the sidewalk outside.

“Fighting is up, profanity is up, everybody’s just on edge,” Lovecchio says, leafing through the files of the 1,800 10th- and 11th-graders he oversees. “In the past, where a teacher might counsel a student who was making trouble, now somebody mouths off and boom, they send him to me. No ‘Let’s talk about it after class,’ no second chances.”

Infractions range from falling asleep in class to pulling a knife on another student. Sometimes the tension results from the sheer physical demands created by the close quarters. One student accidentally knocks another’s paper to the floor as he tries to squeeze through a narrow aisle. Name calling erupts, a punch is thrown and both students wind up cooling their heels outside Lovecchio’s office.

Teachers are not immune either. The accumulated indignities have pushed many over the brink--their anger at pay cuts that will cost them each more than $2,000 this year, their conviction that administrative spending has been preserved while schools suffer. They bicker among themselves over whose department was cut the most, and complain to their students about missing chalk and broken clocks. “Everyone feels cheated, and that’s the seed of anger,” says English teacher Pam Felcher. “We’ve lost the spirit of, ‘This is a team, we can do it.’ ”

With class size soaring, teachers complain they spend more time disciplining than teaching. “With so many kids, there’s not a lot of learning going on anymore,” says Milt Nemiroff, whose gym classes have 70 students and more this year. “I feel sorry for the good kids. They stand around waiting for a lesson while you’re having to deal with the troublemakers.”

Since his first day at Grant, when the school opened in 1959, Nemiroff, 56, has prided himself on getting personal with his charges. But this year, the semester was more than half over before he learned the names of all his 300 students. “If I could, I’d leave next week,” he says tiredly.

Abbreviated district repair crews have gotten so backed up, it took nine weeks to replace a missing volleyball net. “I could have gone out and bought one and put it up in one day, but why should I?” Nemiroff asks. “It’s not my job.”

When negotiations between the district and the teachers’ union broke down last fall, union leaders urged teachers to refuse to go an inch beyond what is required of them, as a personal protest against pay cuts. And though they voted not to walk off their jobs in November--one teacher calling it “financial suicide”--the notion of a work slowdown makes perfect sense to many.

Drama teacher Parke McAlister rejected the union’s advice and agreed to hold after-school play rehearsals this semester. McAlister was one of the few Grant sponsors willing to stay on without pay. The drill team, cheerleaders and student newspaper were facing shutdowns until district officials backed down under a barrage of complaints, “found” the money they had cut from the budget, and restored the extra pay for faculty advisers. “I was suckered,” McAlister says, his rueful laugh betraying his bitterness. “I won’t get fooled again.”

COLIN “DOC” WAINWRIGHT IS HUNKERED OVER A LAWN MOWER, his tool kit at his side. There is a sputter, then silence. Wainwright works silently for several minutes, finally diagnosing a broken valve. He mulls over whether to report it to the school district repair office, as procedures dictate, or take a stab at fixing it himself. “If I got the parts, it would probably take me an hour to repair,” he says, wiping his grimy hands on his blue jeans. “If I send it downtown, I’ll get it back in six months, if I’m lucky.”

For 15 years, Wainwright, 45, has run the agriculture program at Grant, teaching would-be farmers and gardeners to raise vegetables and tend livestock on a one-acre plot. It’s an ambitious--some might say foolish--undertaking for an urban school, but it has been a source of pride since the days when the San Fernando Valley was dotted with stables and orange groves. Now, teachers in nearby classrooms complain of the smell and noise from a dozen goats, sheep and pigs, and Wainwright must compete with high-tech elective courses for money and students. Enrollment in his three agriculture classes has dipped below 100 this year. He knows his program could be on the chopping block.

So he keeps a low profile--relying on donated food to feed his animals and vying for government grants, something teachers districtwide are getting used to. His students raise money through noontime sales of pizza and soft drinks, and he reaches into his own pocket to cover whatever shortfall remains.

Like his colleagues, his pay was cut this year by 3%, but when you ask him about it, he shrugs. With a doctorate in botany, he didn’t go into teaching for the money. “I love what I’m doing. Nothing’s going to change that,” he says, sitting at a picnic table crowded with students who prefer the sun-baked agriculture patio to the bustle of the lunch area. “We’ve had to be pretty self-sufficient; that’s how we survive.”

When layoffs hit the painting crews six months ago and stopped them from finishing repairs in one of his bathrooms, Wainwright told his boys and girls to take turns sharing the remaining toilet. After the cuts in Grant’s custodial staff, Wainwright assigned students to pick up paper, sweep the walkways and tidy the classroom each day. Then once a week, when the students are gone and the animals are fed, the teacher does his part and scrubs the toilet.

In fact, many teachers have found themselves wielding brooms and mops to keep their classrooms tidy; others entice students to do it by paying them or offering extra credit to boost their grades. Plant manager Bill Brooks knew that when the cuts took away two of his 15 custodians it would be hard to keep pace with cleaning chores. But he didn’t account for his biggest problem: Absenteeism brought on by the plunge in morale. Custodians get up to 13 paid sick days a year, and the increased workload has made many of them sicker than ever. “It’s never been this bad before,” says Brooks, who has been with the district for 24 years. Some Mondays and Fridays, almost a third of his staff doesn’t show. “We prioritize and concentrate on keeping things sanitary, like the restrooms and the lunch area,” he says.

Outside, the well-tended campus belies the maintenance cutbacks. Graffiti etched on campus walls hardly has a chance to dry before it is wiped clean. But inside, there are telling signs of neglect. Hallway floors have a coating of dust so thick they are slick, almost slippery. Half the bathrooms have been padlocked because there are too few security aides to patrol them, and the others are reeking and filthy by mid-morning.

“Teachers are used to coming in to a classroom with a clean floor; that was something we were always able to do,” Brooks says. “We’d like to give them that, to sweep the classrooms every day, but the reality is, we can’t. What I worry more about is how we’re ever going to strip the floors and wash the furniture and the lights--the things you have to do to keep this place from falling apart down the line.”

Teachers complain loudly about the grime. Privately, the custodians gripe that teachers and students don’t cooperate in keeping the campus clean. It’s all part of the resentments that fester when a school reaches the breaking point.

OLEETHA ARNOLD, 38, KNOWS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO SLIDE through high school unchallenged and emerge unprepared. And she knows that a dedicated teacher can spell the difference in a young person’s life.

Twenty years ago, her path was charted by a science teacher at Jefferson High School who saw a bright young girl behind a rebel’s facade, and pointed her toward college. Studying on a scholarship at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, she learned a lesson that has marked her 13 years as a teacher--the importance of rigorous preparation for college-bound teen-agers.

Now, each of the 200 students in her five classes has a writing assignment each day. Most of her evenings are given over to grading their papers. She buys supplies the school does not provide, so her students can learn to conduct lab experiments.

“I know a lot of teachers are opting for demonstrations, because a lab takes a lot of extra work,” she says. “But if these kids don’t get exposed to this in high school, the first time they have to do it in college, they’re going to be lost.”

The Grant administration prides itself on sending its students on to college. Almost half of its 650 June graduates will be accepted at universities next year, and another 300 will enroll in junior college, Collins brags. But Arnold wonders what those figures will mean years from now, if students cannot succeed in college.

And as bad as things have been this semester, it is likely to get worse this spring when pending cuts will cost Grant four teaching positions, 25 of its 550 classes and the money to hire substitute teachers, forcing full-time instructors to give up their free periods to cover.

“I’d argue that while education will still proceed in spite of the cuts, we’re failing to prepare these kids for life after high school,” Arnold says. That, she fears, is the insidious danger of budget cuts. She also worries that, with 40 students each period vying for attention, she might miss that youngster like herself, the one who needs an extra push. Johnetta Smith was one of those youngsters. By her own admission, the 12th-grader is not the world’s best student. She is popular and sociable, but her attention tends to wander. The high point of her day is her after-school practice with the Lancers drill team. But last year Johnetta surprised herself, earning a B in Arnold’s biology class.

“When I started out, I wasn’t keeping up, but she’d always tell me I could do better,” Johnetta says. “She’d stay after class to explain things to me if I didn’t understand. She stayed on me all the time.” She rolls her eyes at the memory.

This year, in an advanced biology class so large there are barely enough seats for all the students, Johnetta is failing. “I don’t know why,” she shrugs. “When the teacher’s talking, I just don’t get it. They go over and over it, but after a while, it’s like we have to move on. “

Her first semester grades were grim. The Ds in Spanish and geometry and F in biology are the worst she’s ever received. She hopes to go to college next year to study psychology, and she knows she’ll never get accepted at this rate.

She doesn’t blame the budget cuts. The school paper, the Odyssey, regularly includes a litany of complaints from teachers and students, but the outrage comes almost exclusively from the teachers. Among Johnetta’s friends, there are complaints about crowded classes and dirty restrooms, but mostly there is a sense of helpless resignation, of waiting it out until graduation day sets them free. She only knows for sure that school is no fun, that no one seems to care.

“It seems like people used to be there for you. Now it’s every one for herself.”