LEARN School Gets Ready to Try Its Wings : Education: Fernangeles Elementary is going through a trial run before taking over its own budgeting. So far, officials have found a tangle of rules and formulas.

The check for $2.7 million, payable to Fernangeles School in the east San Fernando Valley, is not in the mail. Instead, it is tacked up on the wall of the elementary school’s main office, enlarged to three times normal size and posted above the heads of the children who troop in and out.

The draft, signed by city schools chief Sid Thompson, is more symbolic than real. The actual cash rests with the giant Los Angeles Unified School District--and largely, for now, so does authority over how and where the money is spent.

But that situation is slowly changing as Fernangeles--along with 33 other campuses pioneering the vaunted LEARN reform effort--begins taking control of its budget.

This first year is a test run on school finance to give Fernangeles and other campuses a chance to work out budget woes while still under the wings of the district. Starting next school year, the district will relinquish most fiscal powers to LEARN schools and the Fernangeles spreadsheets will become hard-boiled reality.

However, the road to financial autonomy--a linchpin of the ambitious decentralization plan--has proved to be tortuous. School budgeting, educators are finding, is a snarl of rules and regulations, figures and formulas that practically defy comprehension.

“Only God could understand it,” said Robin Movich, who teaches kindergarten at the Fernangeles campus in Sun Valley.

Over the last few months, Movich and other Fernangeles staff members have struggled to master the Los Angeles school system’s intricate budget process in an attempt to gain their fiscal freedom. Armed with printouts and calculators, school officials have crunched some numbers and rejiggered others to produce a campus budget they could call their own.

But they soon found themselves hemmed in by a tangled skein of state and district regulations that sharply restrict their flexibility to spend money as they see fit.

Most of the public money comes earmarked for certain programs or can only be applied toward specific purchases, such as hiring an extra teacher to help reduce class size. Other funds must pass through the central administration and have a portion docked to help pay for certain services, such as special education, before the money reaches the school.

And everywhere are rules and laws, so convoluted and interwoven that tinkering with just one of them brings you up against the rest.

“It’s like that game where you drop all the sticks and you try to pull one out from under another--and the whole thing moves,” Principal Elisabeth Douglass said.

“You have to have rules, you have to have guidelines,” Movich said. “But . . . new rules haven’t replaced old rules, and new ways of thinking haven’t replaced old ways of thinking.”

In this case, new data supplied by the school district also hasn’t replaced old data.

Fernangeles officials must often work with 3-year-old statistics that do not paint a completely accurate portrait of the current financial outlook. Within a month, the district expects to provide LEARN schools with some information from 1991-92, but a complete set of updated figures from last year will not be available any time soon because of lengthy accounting procedures.

“The books were just closed for ‘92-93 and are being audited right now,” said Henry Jones, the district’s budget director. “There’s some lag time. We’re moving . . . as rapidly as possible.”

According to the information available, expenses at Fernangeles outweigh its $2.7 million revenue by $33,000--an amount equal to the salary of one of the newer teachers on its 40-member faculty.

But because this is still a trial run, the school is spared from having to put on the chopping block any of the already cash-pinched programs that cater to its 1,100 students. Nonetheless, the deficit projection has served notice to campus officials as they plot the course for next year.

“There isn’t a lot of leeway right now,” Douglass said. “We’re trying to find ways to get some more.”

One way, for other LEARN pioneers as well as Fernangeles, has been to question some longstanding district budget practices.

For example, each school’s payroll expenses--the lion’s share of a school’s costs--are currently calculated using average, not actual, salary figures. At Fernangeles, Douglass estimates that if actual staffing costs were computed, the campus would be in the black--not the red--by as much as $40,000.

That extra cash, plus special federal money she hopes the school may be eligible to receive, “would make a tremendous difference,” she said. “Then you could have somebody running a computer lab, or (do) full-time nursing, or running the library.”

A newly formed budget committee of LEARN schools and district officials met for the first time recently to begin working through such issues. Jones said the transfer of budget authority to the local level has also been complicated by a court order mandating the equalization of spending patterns across the mammoth district. “You have to be sensitive with maintaining compliance with the law,” he said.

Until the financial questions are resolved and potential funds materialize, many of the changes LEARN schools hope to implement may have to remain on the wish list.

At Fernangeles, during two days of discussion earlier this month to stitch together a vision for their school, teachers brainstormed a list of more than 60 ideas for improving campus life. But how to accomplish such goals without extra money--or, worse, while running a deficit?

“Good question,” Douglass said. “You can always go out and try for grants, but applying takes a lot of time, a lot of expertise. Maybe we need to go to some schools to see how they do things differently.”

Because changes have not reached the classroom, several teachers remain skeptical of the LEARN plan, or say the effort has yet to have a direct impact on them or what goes on between them and their students.

“LEARN is trying to focus not only the school but the entire community on what is directly best for the children,” said Debbie Hoffman, who has taught at Fernangeles for a decade. “It’s not the first time people have tried this, but hopefully it’s the last.”