The California Budget: Local Impact : ‘School Clusters’ Set Up as Part of Major District Overhaul

Los Angeles schools chief Sid Thompson announced Thursday that he has begun a major, two-year overhaul of the mammoth district’s bureaucracy, including the elimination of four regional offices, three associate superintendent posts and the creation of self-governing “school clusters.”

By the start of the 1994-95 school year, Thompson said, the district’s 650 campuses will be organized into 25 clusters made up of two high schools and their feeder campuses, a move that reflects the goals of the LEARN reform plan.

Six of the district’s top officials--three associate superintendents and three deputy budget directors--will be stripped of their job titles, reassigned and take salary cuts that will save the district $50,000 a year. The six earn annual salaries of between $95,000 and $108,000 each.

In addition, four regional assistant superintendents who earn about $90,000 a year will be reassigned and take about a 5% salary cut.

“I would submit that anyone who wants to use the term ‘fat cat’ to describe this system ought to look elsewhere,” Thompson said. “We want to keep the schools as clear as they can be to do the job they are supposed to. . . . A year from now, this place won’t be the same.”

The announcement came hours before the Board of Education unanimously approved the district’s $3.9-billion budget, which for the first time in four years did not impose layoffs or harsh cuts in education programs and salaries.

District finances are contingent on the adoption of a state budget that does not reduce education funding, as well as on receiving about $35 million in unclaimed desegregation funds. Under the district budget, 100 vacant school janitorial positions will be eliminated.

Board members cautioned against taking a rosy view of the budget. “We are very much the district that we were a year ago when we made $400 million in cuts,” said board member Mark Slavkin. “We remain in a position no one finds acceptable.”

Under the new budget, $11 million will be cut through unfilled positions in central administration and by restructuring the finance department.

Those reductions are in keeping with the recommendations of a district-ordered management audit that Thompson is using as his blueprint for restructuring. The $500,000 audit by the firm Arthur Andersen & Co., publicly accepted by the school board last week, described a system in a “downward spiral,” mired in an inefficient bureaucracy where managers are not held accountable.

Thompson, in a symbol of what he said is the district’s drive to put the needs of schools first, pointed to a flowchart Thursday with schools as the top box and school board and superintendent on the bottom.

He said his goal is to “change the culture, change the environment” in the district to move away from a management that relies too heavily on central administrators issuing directives and instructions. “It hasn’t worked,” Thompson said.

The new Thompson Administration will include Ruben Zacarias as his top deputy and nine administrative departments, streamlining what had been a maze of associate and assistant superintendents and department heads.

Four new positions--finance, human resources, facilities management and director of communications--are open and will probably be filled from the outside. The remaining slots--including school operations and instruction and a new post called quality management, which will evaluate all administrators and departments--are to be filled next week.

In addition, by the start of the 1994-95 school year, 25 “cluster leaders” earning about $84,000 a year--the same as a high school principal--will be in place to provide district services and oversight at schools.

This is in keeping with a five-year reform plan by LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now), which gives school principals, working with parents and teachers, authority to make decisions on issues ranging from budgets to curriculum.

The administration restructuring, including the consolidation of a confusing array of business departments, will save the district about $11 million in the next fiscal year.

No one will lose jobs under the Thompson plan. “You are not going to see a dynamiting of the system,” Thompson said. “We took the licks with the management audit. But you can’t expect more of us than to fix it.”

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein, whose union has long been critical of high-paid district bureaucrats, said Thompson is moving in the right direction but that it is too early to tell if the changes are more than job shuffling.

“I’m more concerned with roles, responsibilities and accountability,” Bernstein said.

She said she also will be questioning the role of the cluster leader. “Is (Thompson) going to replace region superintendents with simply more cluster leaders?” Bernstein asked. “That’s not what we are about. We do not want another layer between the schools and the superintendent.”

In an move to fend off public criticism that administrators’ salaries are bloated, Thompson said eight employees--including himself, Zacarias, two attorneys, a district doctor and a business department head--earn more than $100,000 annually.

“Next year, there will be only six,” Thompson said. In 1990, 34 management employees earned more than $100,000, according to district statistics, a figure harshly ridiculed by teachers union officials.