School Year Off to a Hot and Halting Start : Education: Sizzling temperatures and cutbacks take a toll as ex-administrators take unfamiliar roles on campus.

It was the start of a new school year at Queen Anne Place Elementary. Custodian AlfordMiller got there early to paint over graffiti splashed on the library door. A preschooler cried because he wanted to go to the mid-city school with the big kids. And Lulu Lopez prepared for her first day as a school principal in nearly six years.

Schools had changed in the time she had been away, working downtown as a district coordinator. She found that walls needed to be repainted and supplies needed to be restocked. But on Tuesday she had other concerns--such as whether the microphone would work during her first student assembly.

At Hart Street Elementary in Canoga Park, new Principal Judy Burton was experiencing her own back-to-school jitters, trying to figure out which keys opened what door and meeting many of her faculty members for the first time. Nevertheless, the former district administrator said she was glad to be back on a campus.

“This feels like going home,” she said amid the noise of scurrying secretaries and ringing telephones. “You’re with the children. That’s what it’s all about.”

On Tuesday, more than 390,000 students returned to classes in the Los Angeles Unified School District, starting a new school year in blistering temperatures and under a cloud of fiscal uncertainty.

The district has eliminated positions, reduced maintenance and proposed drastic pay cuts this school year to slash $400 million from its $3.8-billion budget. And officials caution that the cutting may not be over if the state reduces the growth in education funding, as Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed, and enrollments continue to climb.

The effects of the cutbacks were apparent on the first day of school. Teachers complained that they were starting the year with too little paper, too few pencils and not enough other supplies for their students. Some classrooms were in disarray because instructors, protesting proposed pay cuts, refused to come in early and prepare them.

And of course, there were the new principals.

Lopez and Burton were two of hundreds of employees who were reassigned in the wake of district cuts. Lopez, a former coordinator of instructional planning and development, said she had visited schools in the course of her administrative duties but had worked in a downtown office. Burton spent one year as one of the district’s elementary school administrators.

Tuesday, they were back on campus.

“I had forgotten what it’s like to be so limited in supplies and resources,” said Lopez, who has been a principal at three other schools in her 27-year career. “It’s one thing to know (about) it intellectually. It’s another thing to experience it personally.”

Lopez, whose school near Pico and Crenshaw boulevards has one custodian, said she spent the days leading up to the opening of school dusting offices and cleaning classrooms. Such tasks are a far cry from her previous job, but Lopez said she is willing to do what is necessary to inspire her students.

“I’m going to do my best to make the school pleasant for children,” Lopez said. “I’m shocked at the condition the schools have been allowed to deteriorate to.”

Burton spent her morning making the rounds to every classroom on the San Fernando Valley campus, introducing herself to students, sorting through a ring of unfamiliar keys and at times consulting her staff lists to figure out which adult was the teacher and which was the teacher’s aide.

Some of the students have attended Hart Street since they were 4 years old as participants in the pre-kindergarten program. “So they know (the school) better than I do,” said Burton, who has worked for the district for 22 years.

Classrooms were sweltering by midmorning. Because of the continuing heat wave, both schools, like many in the district, were scheduled to have shortened days this week.

By noon, Lopez had greeted her teachers over homemade muffins, visited each classroom and written a shortened-day advisory for parents. Lopez also planned to finish putting together teacher handbooks and have a meeting with her faculty before her first day was over.

Lopez said that for years she had gone in and out of schools, counseling administrators and teachers on subjects ranging from stress management to gang prevention. She had devised a 40-step curricular plan dealing with children’s self-esteem and personal development. But now that is all on hold.

Lopez, like Burton at Hart Street, said she has no regrets.

“I have to move on to bigger challenges,” she said. She looked around her new campus. “I need to be where I’m needed the most.”