Board Refuses to Increase Funding for Charter Schools : Education: But Pacoima campus gets one-time grant. Principal plans to continue push for more yearly money.

The Los Angeles Board of Education declined Monday to fund its independent charter schools at a higher level than other campuses, but awarded a one-time grant to the Vaughn Street charter school in Pacoima to help it through this fiscal year.

The two decisions cap months of wrangling over the funding issue, which went as far as the State Board of Education in September when Vaughn Street and Fenton Avenue School in Lake View Terrace insisted that they were due $300 more per student than the Los Angeles Unified School District had allotted.

The two schools became largely autonomous this year after winning charter status, a state designation that exempts schools from most state and local regulations in an effort to encourage innovation and enhance education. Of the district’s 10 charter campuses, Vaughn and Fenton have asked for higher funding to enable them to carry out new programs, but the effort has been dogged by the dispute.

Under the policy approved Monday, the two campuses will be funded at $2,800 a year per pupil--the same rate used for the rest of the district’s 419 elementary campuses. The board also decided that junior high schools and high schools will continue to receive a higher per-pupil allocation, reaffirming a longstanding practice that Vaughn and Fenton had sought to overturn.

However, in a controversial concession, the district will grant the Vaughn Street school--now called the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center--an extra $149,000 this year to support its programs, which include efforts to hire more teachers and reduce class size.

“They built their budget on a certain set of assumptions, and we think they should be given the benefit of the doubt,” said Richard K. Mason, the district’s attorney.

“It’s a fair compromise,” said board member Julie Korenstein.

Other members sharply disagreed, saying the grant was unfair to other schools and noting that it would do nothing to end the basic dispute with officials at Vaughn and Fenton, who vowed to pursue the funding issue with state education authorities or in the courts.

“They have to play the same game all of the others schools have to play,” said board member Barbara Boudreaux, who voted against the grant, which passed 4 to 3. “They have to have the same budgets that the other schools have.”

The $149,000 supplement pushes Vaughn’s per-pupil amount close to the $3,100 the school requested. But the school must begin reducing its expenditures next year to bring its spending in line with other district elementary campuses. District officials say the budget trimming will be necessary for Vaughn to comply with the settlement of a lawsuit mandating equalized spending levels throughout the mammoth school system.

Fenton Avenue’s funding will be raised to the $2,800 per-pupil level but will not be augmented beyond that.

“We can squeak by,” Principal Joseph Lucente said, but the school will have to shelve plans to offer after-school and Saturday tutoring and enrichment programs that were budgeted using the $3,100 figure.

Vaughn Principal Yvonne Chan said she was pleased to receive the $149,000 grant but told the board she would raise the funding issue at a public hearing on charter schools to be held next month in Sacramento before the Senate Education Committee. District officials will be instructed to work with state education authorities and legislators to seek clarification on the funding issue, according to a provision of the policy approved Monday.

The Los Angeles district receives $3,127 annually per student from the state and sets different funding levels for elementary, junior high and senior high schools.

In a conciliatory gesture, Chan said she was willing to accept the need to fund secondary schools at a higher rate because their programs are more costly to run. But she said she would press for at least $2,955 per pupil, the rate at which the state funds elementary schools located in all-elementary districts.

“That figure is state-established,” Chan said. “We don’t want to argue next year--that’s the No. 1 benefit. That figure is fair to all.”