Settlement of L.A. Schools Suit Challenged : Education: Union and some parents say the proposed agreement would hurt teachers and middle-class students.

The Los Angeles teachers’ union and a group of parents are challenging a proposed settlement to a landmark lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District, contending that the agreement would unfairly penalize teachers and hurt middle-class schools.

The groups have submitted alternative plans aimed at correcting what they see as central flaws in the settlement: It fails to consider the special funding that inner-city schools with a majority of poor and low-achieving students receive and it threatens to turn many school staffs upside down by forcing transfers of teachers.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the terms of the settlement Thursday. The consent decree, as the settlement is called, is due in Superior Court on Friday.

The five-year-old lawsuit, Rodriguez et al vs. the Los Angeles Unified School District, was filed by a coalition of public-interest law firms on behalf of four black and Latino parents. It takes the unusual approach of evaluating the deployment of district resources--from the experience level of teachers to the size of playgrounds--to back up its central allegation that the district spends up to $400 less per child on schools that serve predominantly poor and minority children.

The tentative settlement--announced in November by lawyers for the plaintiffs and the district--would equalize district spending so that each school received the same amount of money, per pupil, to pay for such things as classroom supplies and teacher salaries.

But because the redistribution plan would exempt certain special funds that benefit schools in low-income neighborhoods, critics say it would disadvantage middle-class schools, which would likely lose money under the proposed changes.

“The problems we have in the inner city we also have on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley,” said attorney Michael Marcus, who is representing his wife and four other parents seeking changes in the settlement. “We don’t believe that the district right now has a different level of education for different schools or different areas. . . . There are no more privileged schools in the L.A. city school system.”

Over the past two weeks, Marcus and lawyers representing the district’s employee unions have held a series of meetings with attorneys for the plaintiffs and the district to discuss whether the proposed settlement can be modified to address their concerns.

The parents and teachers have been granted intervenor status by the judge in the lawsuit, and their concerns must be heard by the judge before a final determination of the suit is made. If a settlement cannot be agreed upon, the case will probably proceed to trial this spring--a prospect all sides say they want to avoid because of the expense and bitterness the legal proceedings would entail.

The lawsuit contends that the district’s poor and minority children receive an inferior education because they are more likely to attend aging, overcrowded campuses where a majority of the teachers are inexperienced.

The proposed settlement would force the district to spend more money staffing and maintaining inner-city schools at the expense of smaller suburban campuses, which tend to cost more to operate in part because they attract more high-paid experienced teachers.

The settlement proposes giving the district five years to equalize costs and bring per-pupil spending at every school to within $100 of the district’s average per-student expenditure. Schools with a substantial proportion of highly paid veteran teachers would have to balance their staffs with lower-paid employees.

District officials say that could be done through attrition--as veteran teachers retire, they would be replaced by new hires who would earn lower salaries.

But union leaders fear the requirement would allow the district to order transfers of veteran teachers, a practice now forbidden under the union’s contract.

“We agree there’s a problem with too many novice teachers at some schools, but we don’t think that’s an issue of allocation of resources and we don’t think this decree is going to solve that problem,” said Day Higuchi, vice president of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

“In fact, we know that if you start mandatorily transferring teachers, the majority of them are going to leave the district,” Higuchi said. “So shifting would, in practice, give you fewer experienced teachers and cause the kind of disruption that this district can’t afford.”

UTLA is proposing that the district provide better training for new teachers and incentives to keep them at the inner-city schools to which they are first assigned.

UTLA would also require the district to change the way it funds schools. Instead of setting aside funds earmarked for students with special needs, the district would pool that money with general funds and give it to schools according to students’ specific needs. A school’s budget would be allowed to reflect, for instance, how many bilingual or special education teachers it needs.

Under the UTLA plan, “The district would use a set of criteria to determine how much each school would get,” said UTLA attorney Lawrence Trygstad. “So schools that needed more bilingual teachers or had kids with special reading problems or a facility that’s not as good as other schools . . . those kinds of problems could be addressed in a way that is thoughtful and educationally sound.”

Trygstad agrees with Marcus, the parents’ attorney, that the proposed settlement will hurt many of the students it is intended to help because it fails to compensate needy children attending middle-class schools that may lose services or experienced teachers under the plan.

At issue are so-called Chapter 1 funds, which come from the federal government to schools with high percentages of poor and low-achieving students. About 280 of the district’s 600 schools receive the funds, which provide, on average, an extra $500 per child each year to pay for such things as classroom aides, field trips, library books and nursing services.

But as many as 20,000 children from low-income neighborhoods that receive Chapter 1 funds must be bused to suburban schools because their local campuses are overcrowded.

Their suburban schools get an extra $165 per bused-in student from the district, but do not receive any of the federal funds those youngsters would have been entitled to had they remained in their neighborhood schools.

Lawyers for UTLA and the parents’ group contend the district could devise procedures to allow that money to be spread among more district schools without violating federal regulations.

Marcus said the money involved is considerable--40 district schools receive more than $1 million each in Chapter 1 funds. “It doesn’t make sense that kids from those schools who are bused . . . and bring the same needs as the students they left behind do not get to benefit from that money,” he said.

More than one-third of the district’s 640,000 students attend schools that share $98 million in Chapter 1 grants--money intended to help compensate for the effects of poverty on learning.

District officials contend that federal policy does not allow that money to follow students to suburban schools--even though at many of those schools a majority of students come from overcrowded inner-city neighborhoods.

The lawsuit and the proposed settlement do not take that money into account in determining the district’s average per-student spending. But UTLA and the protesting parents have asked that the funding formula be recalculated to include those categorical funds.

“Their biggest concern is that somehow categorical money ought to follow children,” said Peter Roos, an attorney with Multi-Cultural Education Training and Advocacy, one of the law firms that filed the suit. “But that’s a policy question that, in our view, has little relation to the problem that we’re dealing with in the lawsuit.

“The majority of kids with great needs are in inner-city schools. To strip resources from these kids doesn’t seem to us to be the solution.”

One provision of the proposed settlement that has generated alarm in many middle-class neighborhoods is an apparent prohibition against using private donations to fund “basic instructional programs” that schools may lose under the new funding levels.

Although the language of the proposed decree merely reiterated the district’s current--but rarely enforced--policy limiting outside fund raising, many parents feared it would be interpreted to prevent schools from using booster club and corporate donations to patch the holes left by district budget cuts.

To defuse the controversy, the plaintiffs’ lawyers say they are willing to delete the fund-raising clause. “It was never our intention to change the district’s policy on fund raising or discourage individual initiative,” said Roos. “We just don’t want schools to be able to get around the decree by going way beyond what other schools can afford to do.”

Because the proposed settlement was announced shortly before most schools began their seven-week winter break, it has been difficult to gauge the reaction of teachers and parents. A series of public hearings by the school district drew a handful of parents and community activists, but the proposal has not sparked the widespread controversy both sides had predicted.

“I think a lot of people at this point are just kind of confused,” said school board member Mark Slavkin. “They’re wondering, ‘What’s the big payoff? . . . How is this going to benefit kids in the end?’ And I’m not sure there’s an answer yet.”