A Kerosene-Age Approach : When will L.A. school district have a computerized accounting network?

An accountant working by kerosene lamp over a dogeared ledger is an image rightly assigned to a bygone era. Unless you work for the Los Angeles Unified School District, in which case this scenario is not far off the mark--although at least the district does use electric lights.

Incredibly, the nation’s second-largest school system still does not have a computer network. It has instead a hodgepodge of 19 systems that cannot communicate with each other. That means that if there is a shortage of books, a principal or a teacher must call around the city to find surplus texts. It means that accountants reconcile important budgetary information by hand. That’s a major reason that, according to auditors, the district was so slow to detect a $130-million funding shortage earlier this year.

In the late 1960s the district began to attempt to build a computer network. But tens of millions of dollars later it still doesn’t exist, and officials say they do not even know how much has been spent on computer equipment, programs and consultants over the last 25 years. Why? Because the expenditures are not computerized.

The most alarming thing about this cycle of ineptitude is that it isn’t at all clear that it’s over. A records search and interviews conducted by The Times show that the computer project was stymied by district indecision and infighting, the purchase of incompatible computer systems, loss of staff and funding shortages since Proposition 13 was enacted. But even if staffing and funding problems were fixed, where is the assurance that more money would be well spent?

And was recent computer work done by the Cordoba Corp., a firm with strong political ties to past and present board members, also part of the problem?

The city needs the answer, because Cordoba is now overseeing the awarding of more than $24 million in riot-related demolition contracts for Rebuild LA.

The district must demonstrate that it has a handle on the administrative problems that led to its current computer mess. Los Angeles public school children can’t afford a horse-and-buggy approach to their education.