Valley Commentary : When It Comes to School Materials, Everyone Is in Dire Need : A school council meets to award money to teachers. Not all of the requests are met. It brings home the low priority our state and city place on education.

The School Leadership Council adjourned at 5:25 p.m. Most of the teachers left first. Parents clustered a moment longer before departing. An assistant principal assured the custodian he would lock up. I moved slowly toward the door.

The meeting had gone well. We had reached consensus on the primary issue at hand. Nevertheless, I felt disheartened.

Each year, schools receive an allocation for instructional materials. The amount is based on enrollment and comes to about $28 per student. About a quarter of the fund goes to running administrative, attendance and counseling offices. The balance is supposed to cover things like ingredients for science experiments, construction paper, pens and markers, chalk, erasers and a host of other non-textbook items. On the average each teacher receives about $250 a year. For my student load it amounts to about $1 per student per semester. It’s easy to see why teachers supplement the meager allocation from their own pockets.

This year, our school decided to create a “superfund” equal to 10% of our account--$7,783. We made the fund available to any department or program with a special need, things that cost more than $250 and which they couldn’t purchase from their materials account. We encouraged everyone to ask for items which could help a lot of students.

Making superfund awards was the primary reason the School Leadership Council met, and we all looked forward to being part of the process, to moving our school forward after so many budget cuts.

Before the meeting, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the condition of public education in Los Angeles in general and of our school in particular. However, since there is little contact among departments, I hadn’t fully understood the abysmal conditions that other teachers were working under. Making the awards brought home the low priority our state and city place on education.

Later I called friends at Chatsworth, Monroe, Verdugo and Sylmar high schools. The story is the same all over: Everyone hopes to get a grant, but it’s like trying to win the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes.

To a big business, our requests would seem pitifully small.

The chemistry teacher asked for new heating stations to replace old, non-functioning Bunsen burners. She’s been trying to comply with state guidelines that call for two hands-on experiments a week. Since she has only six working heating elements, the class is divided into groups of six or seven. That means that while two students have a hands-on experience, the other four or five are hands-off.

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The music teacher asked for some additional band instruments. Fifty students share 20 instruments in each class. While they wait their turns, they read or listen to music or play cards.

The photography teacher asked for a photo drying unit, cost $1,283. Currently, he dries hundreds of student photos, which won’t all fit in the old unit, on clotheslines strung around the room.

The graphic arts teacher had already scrounged video monitors and computer parts from businesses’ discards but needed three hard drives for $762.

The school secretary asked for a computer station, because they are still using typewriters in the office. Imagine running a business with 3,000 employees using a typewriter and a hand-held calculator.

My department, language arts, wanted a computer capable of handling a desktop publishing program that my son had donated. We’ve been planning to publish a student art and literary magazine in the spring.

The requests went on and on. I wished we could have granted all of them. But all we had was the $7,783 we had scraped together.

We did the best we could. The band will have a few more trumpets and tubas. Graphic arts will have hard drives to run its software. Science won’t have all the heating sources it needs, but six new ones will help. And our main office will have one computer station which the dozen or so clerks will share.

There won’t be a new dryer for photography or CD-ROM for social studies. Business students will continue to clunk away on their typewriters.

Creative writing? Well, we didn’t get our computer. Nevertheless, my students will continue writing their poems and stories, and I will continue bringing them home to type. We will manage to publish our magazine. Unfortunately, it won’t be the kids who learn to do desktop publishing.

About my colleagues and their students? Wanted: a city of angels.