UTLA Enlists Students in Mail Campaign : Education: Youths were free to voice any view in letters to the governor, union says. But the messages are being delivered in a coffin to symbolize the effect of budget cuts on learning.

For 33 Chatsworth sixth-graders, writing letters about proposed budget cuts was a combination civics and English lesson that taught them how to write a business letter and avoid sentence fragments.

But the letters to Gov. Pete Wilson also had a broader purpose than a mark in the teacher’s grade book.

They were part of a citywide campaign, orchestrated by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles, to protest the state budget approved early Wednesday.

Since last week, union officials have gathered thousands of the letters from many Los Angeles schools.

“There’s a civics lesson in expressing yourself to your elected official,” union President Helen Bernstein said. “All we’re asking is that students tell the governor what they want for their education.”

But others are calling the campaign a naked attempt to use children to further political agendas.

“I think it’s absolutely outrageous,” said Bobbi Fiedler, a former member of both the Los Angeles school board and Congress. “To use children to lobby in behalf of teachers’ goals is very dangerous.”

Teachers from Huntington Park to Chatsworth defended the campaign, saying that the children were free to express any opinions, whether in favor of or against the governor’s spending plan.

However, letters received so far will be sealed Monday in a coffin that will be carried through the city in a mock funeral cortege before being delivered to the state Capitol in Sacramento.

The symbolic death of education is intended to send a message to the public and the Los Angeles school board about what is happening to public schools, Bernstein said. The budget will force financially strapped schools to pay back millions of dollars in the coming years.

It is a time of extreme financial insecurity for teachers, who face a potential pay cut of 17% in the latest round of budget slashing by the district. This year, the nation’s second-largest public school system was forced to deal with a $400-million budget shortfall, mostly by digging into the salaries of its employees.

To protest the newest cuts, the teachers’ union has threatened a number of hardball tactics, including a billboard campaign that describes “35,000 unhappy teachers” and a plan to discourage companies from moving to Los Angeles. The letter-writing campaign is another part of a strategy developed during the summer to combat the budget proposals.

But many education experts questioned whether using children in the protest is appropriate.

Cecelia Mansfield, a vice president of the San Fernando Valley-based 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn., expressed concern that the letter writing be conducted in a way that would justify the use of classroom time.

Even Lenore Ellis, the union’s chapter president at Germain Street Elementary School in Chatsworth, said doubts about the letter writing dissuaded her from assigning the task to her sixth-grade students.

“I was unsure what the implications would be of asking the students to write letters on class time about an issue like this,” she said.

A district spokesman said it was difficult to determine whether the campaign complies with the system’s general rule that “there must be balanced presentation of subject matter, in whatever way the teacher feels is appropriate.”

But many teachers said they believed it was a valuable lesson and assigned it for regular or extra credit to their elementary and high school students. Superior Street Elementary School in Chatsworth contributed 240 letters to the coffin effort, said Karen Friedman, a sixth-grade teacher and union representative for the school.

One first-grader drew a picture of students crowded around a table, tears streaming from their eyes. A sixth-grade student drew a political cartoon showing the Capitol building throwing “education” in a trash basket. His classmates wrote page after page on the budget crisis.

“I don’t think you should cut our teachers’ salaries,” one sixth-grader wrote. “I think you should not cut the teacher’s salary and school supplies,” said another.

Teacher Betty Pearl said the letters were written after a brainstorming session in which children’s views were posted on a bulletin board. Some of the children said they had discussed the issue with their parents. Others said they picked up most of their information from the classroom.

At Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, health instructor Dave Ptashne said about 800 letters written by students were collected late last week and handed over to the teachers’ union for delivery to the governor. Ptashne insisted that the students were expressing their own opinions.

“We just asked students to write a letter to Pete Wilson asking them to show how education has changed during the last year. Whatever they said we turned it in,” he said.