Ailing Schools Spend $250,000 on P.R., Poll : Education: Teachers union criticizes cash-strapped L.A. district. Officials say the consultants are needed.

During the past year, the financially troubled Los Angeles Unified School District has spent about $250,000 on an opinion poll and public relations consultants to enhance the credibility of school officials and repair the district’s battered image, records show.

The consultants have written speeches for Supt. Bill Anton and coached him before news conferences, supplying him with answers to questions reporters might ask about the district’s deepening budgetary crisis.

As part of the district’s image-building campaign, they instructed school board President Warren Furutani on how to conduct a board meeting on a controversial plan to distribute condoms to students.

The public relations firm also has ghostwritten letters praising the school system and attacking the president of the teachers union.

The letters were designed to be signed by parents, teachers and principals and sent to newspapers, according to district records. But district officials said they decided not to send them.

The documents were prepared by Winner/Wagner & Associates--a firm specializing in “crisis communications management.” The company has been paid up to $10,000 a month in district funds and is now being paid through a grant from the family trust of jailed financier Michael Milken.

The public relations campaign comes as budgetary problems have driven the district to the brink of insolvency and forced it to eliminate hundreds of jobs and campus services.

Anton could not be reached for comment. In an interview, Furutani said he was not aware of details of the public relations campaign but defended the expenditure.

“Frankly, there’s a realization, we need help (with media issues),” he said. “We’ve been handling it as amateurs. . . . Getting our message out is important, and we haven’t been very good at it.”

The board president said that if the public relations contract is extended next year, the district might fund the consultants by making cuts in the district’s $1-million-per-year communications division.

The district communications office has 12 full-time employees, is overseen by a deputy superintendent, and is directed by a former community television show hostess whose annual salary is more than $93,000.

Asked to comment on the district’s public relations campaign, teachers union President Helen Bernstein said she had been unaware of the effort but criticized district officials for diverting money from schools.

“To think that they’re taking taxpayer money to teach the superintendent and his staff how to manipulate the press and how to fight back in a dishonest way against the union . . . it’s just incredible,” Bernstein said.

Despite the expenditures, the district has been beset by a string of public relations problems in the past year, including reports of the superintendent “forgetting” to take an announced 10% pay cut and the revelation in January of a $130-million budget shortfall.

In addition to spending $90,000 on outside public relations consultants, the district paid $158,000 for a public opinion poll to evaluate whether voters would approve a school construction bond issue.

The poll and public relations effort were commissioned in March, 1991, to guide the district as it considered whether to ask voters to approve a $1.5-billion bond measure to construct schools and install air conditioning and correct safety hazards in older buildings.

For $93,000, the Santa Monica-based polling firm, Fairbank, Bregman & Maullin, said it would survey 1,500 voters and help the district plan a strategy for winning at the polls. The firm received an additional $65,000 to give the district “strategic analysis and advice on major and emerging public policy issues.”

In a seven-page report, the firm said the poll showed strong support for a bond issue, but found a “negative image of the district and the strong concerns expressed by voters about its direction, policies and administrative efficiency.”

As an outgrowth of the Fairbank poll, district officials were advised by Fairbank to emphasize a new, leaner administrative image.

In its plan for the district, Winner/Wagner said: “The objective of the communications program is to restore voter confidence in district leadership and management of Los Angeles’ public schools system so as to assure passage of the bond measure.”

But before the new strategy could be used, the district found itself reacting to a series of problems--such as massive budget cuts in the summer, teacher layoffs that raised class size to the largest in the nation, and a threatened strike over salary reductions.

District officials now say it will be April, 1993, at the earliest, before the bond issue is put on the ballot.

In the meantime, the public relations effort has expanded to address the district’s mounting woes.

“What we’re looking at is how do you build public support for public education in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is under enormous attack and is in a crisis,” said Scott Fitz-Randolph, spokesman for Winner/Wagner, in an interview Friday.

He said the ghostwritten letters were drafted in November as an option for the district in responding to a Times story written at the height of the furor over the salary cut and strike threat. The story quoted the teachers union president calling district administrators “stupid idiots” and “mean and vicious human beings.”

In the story, Bernstein stated that she was opposed to “playing God” in her dealings with her union members “since I don’t believe in a God.”

One of the letters Winner/Wagner drafted--ostensibly from a “religious leader”--said in part: “Not only does Bernstein lack a God, but she also lacks any standards of decency.” Others letters drafted by the firm criticized the union’s negotiating tactics.

The letters were drafted as “Letters to the Editors” of newspapers, including The Times, but district officials said none were mailed.

Winner/Wagner’s Fitz-Randolph said the letters were an attempt to show the district the options it had in responding to the article. He said district leaders could have asked parents, teachers, principals or a religious leader who agreed with the views in the letters to sign one.

Fitz-Randolph likened the letters to writing a political announcement for television, then getting someone who agrees with it to read it on the air. “It is not an uncommon thing in communications to find your allies,” he said.

After discussions between the Winner/Wagner staff and the district’s Dominic Shambra, head of the office overseeing the poll and public relations work, it was decided that no letters would be sent, said school district and company officials.

“We didn’t think that was the appropriate thing for us to be doing,” Shambra said, adding that neither Anton nor any board members saw the letters. “We want to keep on the high road.”

The outside poll and public relations operation is under the jurisdiction of Shambra’s special construction projects office.

In February, the district’s second $45,000 contract with Winner/Wagner expired and there was no money to renew it. Shambra successfully solicited a $40,000 donation from the Milken Family Foundation to pay the firm through the end of June.

“Our district, already badly weakened by a budget crisis, continues to endure a public credibility problem,” Shambra wrote Jules Lesner, executive director of the foundation. A Milken Foundation spokesperson could not be reached for comment. Other districts contacted by The Times said it is unusual for a school district to employ an outside public relations firm.

Tom Sammon, executive assistant to the superintendent in the 63,000-student San Francisco school district, said that when budget constraints hit the district about four years ago, one of the first offices to get the ax was the public information section. Sammon said he handles that duty himself now.

The financially distressed Oakland school district last year shelved a proposal to hire consultants to measure public opinion on a bond issue. The school district has one spokeswoman who handles public relations.

In San Diego Unified, Phil George, coordinator of communications and public affairs, has one assistant and two secretaries to handle all public relations and internal communications. The district, with 122,000 students, is about one-third the size of the Los Angeles district.

“It helps us that the superintendent does an awful lot of work directly with the press,” said George. “He feels that’s real important.”

George said a volunteer community group is handling public relations for a $215-million school finance measure on the June ballot.