Special Accounts Face Raid in School Plan : Education: Money to avoid teachers strike would come from funds for books, supplies and field trips. Waiver of state law is required. Board OKs proposal and teachers are to vote this week.

The contract proposal that could prevent a potentially devastating teachers strike in the Los Angeles school system comes with a $72-million price tag that will likely mean fewer new textbooks and other classroom materials and less money for field trips and other enrichment activities this year and next.

The proposal--drafted by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and approved on Monday by the Board of Education--would return to teachers and 10,000 other employees 2% of the 12% cut from their salaries last fall to help bridge a $400-million budget deficit.

But restoring that part of the lost salary hinges on the district’s ability to raid its emergency reserve and replace that fund with money from other accounts that, under state law, can only be used for such purposes as textbooks and enrichment programs, officials said Monday.

Between $40 million and $50 million in several school-based spending accounts--including textbook funds--was frozen Monday by Supt. Sid Thompson, pending this week’s vote by teachers union members on the Brown contract proposal.

The board voted 6-0 Monday to approve the Brown settlement proposal. Board member Roberta Weintraub abstained, saying that she would not endorse the proposal until union leaders take a stand on it. The union’s board sent the proposal to its members without a recommendation.

The board also approved hiring Arthur Andersen & Co. to conduct a $500,000 management audit that will recommend ways to streamline district operations.

Last year, the district’s 58,000 full-time employees had their pay cut by 3% to help cover the district’s budget shortfall. This year, budget problems forced the board to impose cuts of 6.5% to 11.5% for most employees, bringing the cumulative cut for teachers to 12%. Teachers threatened to walk out over the pay reduction.

United Teachers-Los Angeles members are scheduled to vote Wednesday and Thursday on the Brown proposal, with results to be announced late Friday. If they reject the offer, teachers will go on strike March 1.

The practical impact of the Brown salary provision is that $72 million in funds that go directly to schools to pay for such things as textbooks, field trips, teacher training and classroom aides will not be available for use this year and next by the schools.

Even without that cut, the district will start its 1993-94 budget planning approximately $100 million in the red, because it has borrowed from other internal accounts to cover budget shortfalls in previous years.

“So when we begin the process, it’s going to be more of the same. More erosion of services to kids,” said school board President Leticia Quezada.

Yet the spending cuts are viewed by many as the lesser of two evils. The deal will reduce the amount schools can spend on classroom materials for the rest of this year and next, but will avoid a strike that would shut down schools and perhaps cause irreparable damage to employees and students alike.

“It’s a lot less of a risk than a strike. A strike would be a catastrophe,” said school board member Jeff Horton. “Reductions in school programs hurt. But this is going to affect children in a very positive way by avoiding a strike. That is the big picture.”

By approving the Brown proposal, the school board accepted a significant compromise: Throughout months of negotiations, board members were unwilling to make deeper cuts in educational programs to improve the salary offer to teachers.

“The way the Speaker put it, if you have a strike, what does it matter if you don’t have textbooks?” Quezada said. “If we are going to avoid a strike, we are going to have to pay the price by cutting these programs, cutting these services, cutting these materials.”

To shift money from the textbook and other funds to pay for salaries, the district must be granted a waiver from the state Department of Education. Under the state education code, each public school system must keep in an emergency reserve fund an amount equal to 1% of its total budgets. That requires Los Angeles Unified to set aside $31 million each year to cover itself in case of economic emergency.

To restore 2% of teachers’ pay, the district has proposed draining its reserve fund, and seeking state authority to designate money from other accounts for emergencies

State Department of Education spokeswoman Susie Lange said Monday that officials have spoken with Brown’s staff about the waiver and “will do whatever we can to make it work. . . . We want to help accomplish the resolution to this (dispute).”

Maureen DiMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s secretary of child development and education, said Brown had not yet discussed the details of the contract proposal with her office, but she questioned the propriety of subsidizing teachers’ salaries with textbook and other funds.

“I’m not sure where in this contract student and parent rights are reflected,” DiMarco said, adding that her analysis of the proposal will also consider what kind of precedent granting such waivers would set for other cash-strapped school districts.

“We would not want to provide an incentive for labor unions to strip out instruction money that is going to kids to pay for salaries,” she said. “I will be looking at the broader picture of protecting the rights of children throughout the state.”

The school board has yet to decide how much money the district will take from each of several restricted accounts. Officials said they will seek waivers to allow them to tap into the accounts to give them the greatest flexibility.

“If anybody has ever doubted that we had a budget problem, this ought to be a sign pure and clear,” Thompson said Monday. “Here we are using restricted funds that we’ve never been able to touch and we’re trying to use them in order to ease the terrible situation the district is in.”

Aside from the textbook fund, Thompson said the bulk of the money would come from the School Improvement program, which pays for enrichment activities, and the mentor teacher fund, which rewards superior teachers and provides training for new teachers.

All three accounts are funded by the state, but spending decisions are made at local schools.

Elementary and junior high schools receive $25 per child annually for textbooks and senior highs receive $17 per pupil. Schools frequently accumulate several years worth of allocations until they have enough to purchase textbooks for an entire grade level or student body.

The biggest pot of money is in the School Improvement account, which offers schools their largest source of discretionary funds. It is allocated at each school by a panel that includes parents, teachers and principals and can be spent on everything from teacher training and field trips to library books and teachers’ aides.

Almost all of the district’s elementary and junior high campuses and 12 of its 49 high schools receive School Improvement money--at $106 annually per student for elementary schools, $31 per junior high student and $80 per high school pupil.

Thompson said no jobs will be cut as a result of the freeze, but spending will be halted on classroom supplies and other enrichment materials.

“Orders that have already been placed will go in, but we’re talking about no more (textbook) orders” this year or next school year, he said.

“The price (of the settlement) is going to be less textbooks and less programs . . . and people will have to remember that,” said Quezada. “When they were saying to us ‘Do whatever you need to do to avoid a strike,’ well this is what we are going to have to do to avoid a strike.”

But UTLA Vice President Day Higuchi said district officials are merely “trying to get political capital” by designating those funds as the source of money to fund the pay restoration.

“We think there’s plenty of opportunity if they wanted to find the money someplace else,” Higuchi said. “But they want to make everybody suffer, as if we haven’t already been suffering.”

Higuchi said that because the district’s textbook account consistently has year-end balances of more than $30 million, the decision to freeze that account will not unduly deprive children of books and classroom supplies.

“Most teachers already go years without new books because of the slow process of acquiring textbooks,” he said. “So the money has accumulated over the years. They’re just playing games with us to say they have to freeze those accounts to get the money. That money has been there and hasn’t been spent at least since 1989.”

Brown’s chief education deputy, Rick Simpson, acknowledged that the proposal would limit the money the district has available for textbooks, but called it the only way out. He said Brown targeted those accounts because they generally have money left over at the end of the year.

“It’s not an easy decision for the school board or for the teachers,” he said. “I think everybody’s preference would be if we could find a whole big gob of money sitting in the bank. . . . But this is a crisis situation and sometimes in a crisis, both at the district level and the school level and the state level, people have to make decisions they might prefer not to make.”

The Brown Proposal Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s 22-point proposal for settling the Los Angeles teachers contract dispute covers a range of issues, from salary and benefits to classroom assignments and notification of student transfers.

Some points have financial implications, while others may affect future contract talks with other district unions.

Here are the highlights: Schools mediator Willie Brown.

SALARY Teachers’ pay cut will be reduced from 12% to 10% and they will be reimbursed by July for the 2% of the pay that has been taken from their checks since last October. It will cost $36 million to reimburse the 40,000 employees--including teachers and administrators--for the 2% restoration. The money will come from accounts used by schools to purchase textbooks and pay for enrichment activities.

If state funding remains even next year, teachers’ salaries will not be reduced and any increased revenues will be used to augment their pay.

ME-TOO CLAUSES If the district makes “me-too” agreements with other unions, it must give UTLA members a 10% bonus. This would make it unlikely that district officials will agree to the protection clauses after 1994. The agreements are a promise to match more favorable terms awarded to a union that signs later and are given to encourage unions to settle early in the negotiating process.

DECISION-MAKING ROLE Teachers at each campus will help make decisions on such matters as assignment of classroom aides; access to parking spaces, lunch areas, telephones and restrooms; selection of program coordinators and deans; grade level and class assignments by seniority. These moves will reduce the authority of principals.

BENEFITS The teachers union will have the authority to design and negotiate contracts for their members’ health and welfare plans.

AUDIT UTLA will participate in and review a management audit of district operations.