THE STATE BUDGET CRISIS : Critics Assail Wilson’s School Plan : Education: Proposal includes changing the minimum age for kindergarten enrollment. And community college spending would be cut 7%.

The Wilson Administration unveiled a new education spending plan Monday, calling on parents to delay sending their children to kindergarten and asking for sharp increases in community college fees, among other proposals.

The plan drew immediate cries of protest from state schools Supt. Bill Honig and other education leaders. Honig said it would still reduce per-pupil spending by $250, dropping California “down there with the states we used to smirk at.”

By limiting kindergarten eligibility to children who have reached their fifth birthday by Sept. 1, instead of Dec. 1, the Wilson plan would produce one-time savings of $335 million, said Maureen DiMarco, the governor’s secretary for education and child development. A 7% cut in proposed community college spending, plus higher student fees, would save another $400 million.

The governor also is proposing to lump together about $1.5 billion worth of “categorical” programs for elementary and secondary schools, then cut that amount by 21% and allow individual school districts to decide how to spend the rest.

The money saved by these budgetary maneuvers would be applied to the schools’ base funding, allowing DiMarco to say that total state and local support for schools in 1992-93 would be only $23 million less than the current year.

“This is not going to be easy for school districts,” she said. “They are going to have a very difficult time, but it is not, as some have suggested, the end of Western civilization as we know it.”

As Wilson Administration officials defended the governor’s planned cuts, lawmakers shuttled among Capitol offices with wildly different plans to balance the budget before the new fiscal year begins Wednesday.

“There’s a thousand flowers blooming,” said Fred Silva, budget adviser to Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys).

One plan--supported by many Democrats--was to give Wilson his proposed schools cut and then grant him broad authority to make the deep cuts in health, welfare and other programs he said were needed to balance the budget without a tax increase. Some Democrats thought this extraordinary act of political surrender might hurt Wilson politically because he would be seen as solely responsible for whatever services are cut from state and local government.

But Wilson indicated in a television interview that he might accept such a plan, even though he has been trying for weeks to get lawmakers to make the cuts themselves.

“I’m prepared to do that,” Wilson said. “If they don’t want to vote for the line-item cuts, I would be happy to do that if it’s legal to do it, if it’s constitutional for them to delegate that to me. I would take the heat. I don’t think the public is going to be in any way deluded that . . . the Legislature didn’t participate” in budget cuts.

But even as Wilson was sending positive signals, Democrats were backing away from the idea, deciding to make one final try to put together a budget deal of their own and then seek to get Republicans to go along.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) late Monday was floating a plan that would erase the deficit with spending cuts and more than $3 billion in one-time economies.

Brown’s plan includes a $600-million cut for schools, the most they say they can withstand without cutting deeply into the regular program. Separately, Honig and advocates for nine organizations representing education and state employees blasted Wilson’s latest proposal.

Honig said Wilson is insisting on deep cuts in education and other state services, instead of “closing tax loopholes” or rolling over part of the expected $10.7-billion budget shortfall until next year, in order to win favor from conservative Republicans.

“He’s decided to draw a line in the sand and prove he’s tough, even if it doesn’t make sense and hurts the schools,” said Honig, who once had a cordial relationship with Wilson. “He’s saying, ‘This is not for kids, this is not for schools, this is for my political career.’ ”

Franz Wisner, a Wilson spokesman, said: “Schools continue to be the governor’s top priority--that’s why he has spared schools the kind of cuts that are being asked for in every other area of state spending.”

DiMarco said that changing the kindergarten starting age would cut next year’s expected statewide enrollment increase in half.

She also said it makes good educational sense because many younger children are not yet ready for kindergarten.

This idea has been supported by the National Education Assn., is policy in at least 20 states and was supported by a 1988 research report produced by Honig’s own Department of Education, DiMarco said.

But the schools chief said the report “recommended just the opposite. We said, ‘If the kids aren’t ready yet, then change the program but don’t keep them out of school at a time when acquiring language and social skills is fundamentally important.’ ”

Honig called the kindergarten limitation “one of the dumbest educational ideas I’ve ever heard.”

DiMarco said the proposal to lump together a variety of school spending programs--everything from home-to-school transportation to special funds for gifted and talented students--into a block grant and let districts decide how to spend the money was made because “these kinds of decisions are best made at the local board level, not by the state.”

The Wilson Administration plan also seeks to move about $400 million in state support from community colleges to elementary and secondary schools, then make up the difference by raising student fees in the two-year colleges.

Fees for all two-year college students would be increased from $6 to $20 per unit, with a maximum of $200 per semester. Students who already have accumulated 90 or more units would be charged up to the full cost of instruction--as much as $112 per unit.

Chancellor David Mertes of the statewide community college system said such sharp increases, coming this late in the year, would have “an absolutely devastating effect on people with 90 units or more” and could especially hurt enrollment of black men.