CALIFORNIA’S SCHOOLS: WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? : Tale of 2 Schools Reveals Worst of Times : Education: Although only 40 miles separate elementaries in struggling Koreatown and affluent Agoura Hills, they are worlds apart. Still, they are bound by one problem--lack of funding.

It would be hard to find two schools as different as Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in Los Angeles and Yerba Buena Elementary School in Agoura Hills.

At Hobart, in the heart of riot-scarred Koreatown, 95% of the 2,300 students are Asian or Latino, two-thirds speak limited English or none at all, and 90% come from families on welfare. The school buildings look battered and tired, and there have been numerous shootings nearby, including a drive-by killing three years ago.

The attractive Yerba Buena campus is 40 miles north, in a prosperous San Fernando Valley suburb of homes worth $300,000 or more. Eighty-six percent of the school’s 636 students are Anglo. Only 19 youngsters speak limited English. Only six come from welfare families.

Two different schools, two different worlds. Yet both suffer from inadequate financial support.

Hobart runs chronically short of supplies such as paper and pencils, and outdated textbooks are used because there is not enough money to buy new ones. Classes at Yerba Buena are growing larger, and resources such as nurses and reading specialists must be shared with other schools.

Recent visits by a Times reporter to a dozen California schools, in affluent and poor neighborhoods, suggest that the problems at Hobart and Yerba Buena are all too common and illustrate the tough choices years of stingy budgets have forced schools to make.

Hobart is smack in the middle of a major entry point for immigrants arriving in Los Angeles from Asia, Mexico and Central America. With 2,300 students, it is the second largest among the 650 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its enrollment surpasses that of many entire school districts in the state.

The school’s annual budget approaches $10 million, which not many years ago would have been unthinkably large for a single elementary campus. Yet, school officials say, Hobart is often short of materials, with such essential items as paper and pencils rationed. Teachers have been limping along with history textbooks so old they do not even mention the Korean War--this in a school where many of the children are of Korean descent.

This year, Hobart received $51,700 in state money to buy instructional materials. Most of the money went for new mathematics texts approved by the State Board of Education several years ago. It also bought new history books--but only enough for grades three through six.

“We never have enough to outfit the school,” said Assistant Principal Susie Oh, “so we have to pick and choose and share.”

To fit more students onto the campus, Hobart runs on a year-round calendar, open every weekday except Christmas. About 1,600 youngsters are in class at any one time. Every inch of the campus is utilized, and the noise level is high.

Another 600 to 800 youngsters are “at our gates every morning,” said Principal Jim Mesrah, who manages this educational factory with astonishing calm. The pupils gather at 6:15 a.m. to take buses to less crowded campuses in the San Fernando Valley.

Soon, these students will be able to attend a new elementary school for 1,000 students under construction two blocks away. But even when that school opens, Mesrah notes, Hobart will still be bursting at the seams. And classes will still be too large.

Because the school benefits from federal and state programs for disadvantaged students, its classes are smaller than in some Westside Los Angeles schools. But education experts generally believe a class of 29 is too high for a school like Hobart, where only one-third of the students are proficient in English and more than a fourth arrived in the United States less than three years ago, many having never attended school. Hobart ranks in the top third statewide of schools with similar socioeconomic characteristics--and in the bottom third in test scores.

“Our problems are multilayered,” Mesrah said. “Language is a tremendous barrier. Socioeconomic conditions are another--I know a mama who moves from motel to motel to motel, trying to keep a roof over her kids’ heads. Add to that the financial problems of the schools and you’ve got a lot of handicaps for one of these youngsters to overcome.”

It is not just schools in poverty-level neighborhoods that are suffering. The impact is being felt in suburban communities as well.

Yerba Buena looks on the surface like the kind of school parents are seeking when they buy expensive homes in the suburbs. Only 24 years old, the buildings have no serious maintenance problems. On a recent visit, the grass was trimmed and the two main buildings were attractively bordered with flowers and plants, placed there by parent volunteers.

Most students score well above average on achievement tests and come from financially stable families that offer many enrichment opportunities.

“Our parents are very education-minded and care a lot, which really helps,” said Principal Dorothy L. Penney, now in her fourth year at the school. Nonetheless, she said, “we’re starting to feel the cuts.”

The Las Virgenes Unified School District, which includes Yerba Buena and 11 other schools in Agoura, Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Westlake Village, has trimmed more than $2.5 million from its $38-million budget in the last three years and faces $500,000 more in cuts next year.

As a result, class size has been increased in the district’s middle schools and will rise in lower grades if state budget cuts are as severe as expected.

The custodian at Yerba Buena now works only four hours a night, instead of eight, not enough time to clean 21 classrooms. “The teachers and kids do a lot of (the cleaning) and the parents pitch in,” Penney said.

All 12 district schools, with a total of 10,000 students, are served by just one nurse who gets to each school once every other week. Yerba Buena used to have a full-time reading specialist but now shares one with another school.

Field trips have been curtailed, few new books are purchased for the school library and there is no money for the kind of “manipulative materials” that help young children learn arithmetic.

If parents, through the Parent-Teacher Assn. and as individuals, did not contribute cash-- more than $30,000 this year, an expected $50,000 next year--and large amounts of volunteer time, school officials say Yerba Buena would be in much worse shape.

Parents pay for art and music instruction and field trips. They not only help clean the classrooms and maintain the grounds but staff the library and the computer lab. They also give $100 to $150 a year to each classroom to use as the teacher sees fit.

“Without the parents,” said Penny, “things would be a lot tighter.”

Even with such strong parent support, the fiscal picture is darkening. Last year, voters narrowly rejected the district’s bid for a $150 parcel tax that would have yielded $3 million, most of which would have been used to reduce class size in junior and senior high school.

“It was frustrating,” said Donald Zimring, assistant superintendent for business. “That would have staved off further cuts, at least for a few years.”

There are hopeful signs amid the gloom and doom. Hobart teacher Rafe Esquith is one such bright spot. Esquith teaches his combined class of 37 fifth- and sixth-graders to love Shakespeare. They read the plays, perform them (“the best way I know to teach English,” he said) and attend performances in Ashland, Ore., and at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

Esquith, 37, raises private funds for these Shakespearean junkets. Last year, he spent $6,000 of his own money on the class--money earned on a second job.

Can schools survive on the heroic efforts of people like Esquith?

Steve Bell, principal at Angeles Mesa Elementary School a few miles away, thinks not.

“There will always be the remarkable teacher like Esquith, or Jaime Escalante (the legendary former Garfield High School calculus teacher). That’s wonderful. But it doesn’t solve the problem. . . . We’re running on a shoestring, and the shoestring is about to break.”