Widespread Ditching May Cost School District Money : Education: Final exams, given early as an economy move, leave students little reason to show up afterward. Attendance-based state funds are in jeopardy.

The Los Angeles Unified School District stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in state revenue because of schedule changes that encouraged many high school students to ditch school this week.

Attendance estimates varied widely from school to school Friday, but officials said that up to half of the district’s 126,000 high school students may have skipped school Thursday and Friday after final examinations were administered earlier this week.

The district’s funding is based in part on attendance at the daily rate of $17.40 per student.

But district budget chief Henry Jones said it is impossible to predict how much the cash-strapped district will lose as a result of the absences because annual revenue projections take into account times when student attendance is expected to be low--such as at the beginning and end of a semester.

“What you’ve really got to look at is how the numbers compare to last year,” he said. “If attendance is off this year by much, that could affect the amount we receive from the state for this fiscal year, but some allowance for that is already built into what we expect to receive.”

It is not unusual for students to skip school at the end of a semester after final exams have been given, books are collected and grades are calculated. But officials said the absentee problem was much worse this year than it had been in the past, although no specific figures were available.

“We’ve always had this problem to a limited degree,” said Dan Isaacs, head of the senior high school division. “High school kids are savvy. If they’ve completed everything for a class, including the last exam, they don’t see much point in sticking around.”

Teachers usually give finals on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the semester’s last week, then calculate final grades and give them to clerks who spend the week after school closes recording grades in a computer and preparing report cards to be sent home.

But this year, clerical workers and other employees were ordered to take unpaid furloughs during the two weeks after school ends to help the district save money. Consequently, most schools opted to give their exams last week or early this week to allow time for record-keeping to be completed before the end of the week.

That gave students the equivalent of two or three days in class with nothing to do, so many did not show up.

Teachers union President Helen Bernstein said the problems could have been avoided with some “creative planning” by district officials, which would have allowed some clerical staffers to take days off this week and work next week.

“We suggested that the district stagger the schedules so they wouldn’t have this kind of problem,” she said. “We know from experience that as soon as finals are over, the kid doesn’t come back to class. Any kid with an IQ over 20 can figure out if your grades are done, why bother showing up.”

In some schools, teachers reportedly told students not to bother coming back to class after final exams. But most tried to provide some sort of activity--such as schoolwide assemblies--to encourage students to return.

“We attracted a few more kids than we might have had with an assembly on the day after finals, but our attendance was definitely down,” said Sharon Dewees, assistant principal at Manual Arts High School in South-Central Los Angeles, where about three-quarters of the 2,200 students did not show up Friday.