400 Students Protest Budget Cuts : Education: They walk out of L.A. schools in opposition to reductions in teachers’ salaries and prospect of larger classes.

About 400 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District walked out of classes Tuesday to protest state budget cuts in education and the prospect of larger classes this year.

“We’re doing this on our own because our class sizes are just going to keep getting bigger,” said 17-year-old Belmont High student Juan Santamaria. “But we’re also doing it for our teachers, because (politicians) are cutting their salaries--and that means less education for us.”

The protesters included about 200 Belmont students, who marched 15 blocks from their campus to City Hall, and about 200 Grant High School students in Van Nuys who held a demonstration on campus. In addition, about 100 youngsters at Porter Junior High School in Granada Hills spent their lunch hour in a peaceful protest rally on campus.

The student protests came in the wake of a massive Labor Day demonstration by thousands of district teachers, which stalled traffic in West Los Angeles and featured a mock funeral procession, complete with a coffin containing students’ protest letters to Gov. Pete Wilson.

The Belmont students walked first to City Hall, where they sought unsuccessfully to speak with Mayor Tom Bradley, and then proceeded to school district headquarters a few blocks away. There they met with Sid Thompson, a deputy superintendent, who listened to their concerns and urged them to return to their classes.

Marta L. Bin, principal of the 4,500-student campus, said the students responded to handwritten flyers that had been circulated on campus during the morning, urging them to “take a stand” and protest proposed cuts in teachers’ salaries and in extracurricular activities and other programs. Bin said she did not know who had instigated the protest.

She said the students were orderly throughout their protest, which was monitored by school officials, and returned to campus after missing three class periods. Because they had been present during the first part of the day, when attendance is taken, they were counted as present and the school will not lose state funding, Bin said.

Nonetheless, students will be disciplined on a case-by-case basis.

“We talked to them (as a group) as soon as they returned, and we will talk individually with each one before deciding what to do,” Bin said. “I explained to them that this is very sad. Their desires may be in the right place, but the way they decided (to communicate them) was wrong. They seemed to accept that,” Bin said.

Some of the placards that students carried read: “No Cuts in Education” and “This Is a Typical Class Size at Belmont--45--Pete Wilson Wants to Add Three More.”

The protesters yelled, “No more cuts!” and “More money now!”

At Grant High School, more than 200 students skipped their third-period classes to protest the budget cuts.

“The natives are getting restless,” warned Alison Atikian, Grant’s student body president, as the crowd behind her yelled, “No more cuts!”