The End of the Line? : Education: Edutrain, a Downtown charter school specializing in giving dropouts a second chance, is in danger of closing because of a host of financial and management problems.

Behind closed doors at Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters, top-level administrators debated Monday whether to rescue a Downtown Los Angeles charter school tailored to the needs of high school dropouts. In a spare classroom at the school’s Grand Avenue campus, 19-year-old Dennis Ray Jones worried.

Jones came to Edutrain Charter School two months ago, after spending most of 11th grade in jail for stealing a car. He came, he said, because he had tired of sitting around the house, contemplating a diminishing future. He came to finish his education and learn a trade.

“They care about me here,” he said. “If this school closed, there ain’t no telling what I’d do.”

By the end of the day, Edutrain--where enrollment spiked at more than 500 students last spring and then plummeted to 100 this fall--had received a temporary bailout from Los Angeles Unified in the form of money that had been withheld for September and October.

But the release of $83,000 to meet the payroll is only a temporary reprieve because the school is about $1 million in debt. With funding based on student population, the debt can only be repaid if enrollment rises back to 500 students, said Winston C. Doby, president of Edutrain’s board of governors and vice chancellor of student affairs at UCLA.

The problems go deeper than money. The school has suffered from widespread disorganization, a damning state audit and management infighting, all of which led to the massive student flight. Even optimistic proponents such as Doby are not sure they can save Edutrain.

“We’ve got a major challenge here,” said Doby, who took administrative control of the faltering school two weeks ago.

To begin meeting that challenge, Doby laid off 24 full-time teachers and staff members Friday and cut pay to remaining employees by 20%. He also laid off a cadre of students who worked part time doing everything from maintenance to errands.

School district officials had held back money for the past two months while the district conducted its own audit of student population. They have asked Edutrain to present a reorganization plan at the school board’s Nov. 14 meeting, on which any future funding will be based.

“We’ve bent over backward to keep them going,” said district spokesman Bill Rivera.

Under state charter law, schools receive five-year contracts from their districts, but that agreement can be broken if they fail to meet their goals.

Edutrain was the third charter school in Los Angeles and the 17th in the state--approved by Los Angeles Unified on the same day in May, 1993, as Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima. However, the two schools have met dramatically different fates since then, with Vaughn managing to come out $1 million ahead last year.

Charter experts see the Edutrain experience as a lesson in the difficulties of managing an independent public school, particularly one that was started from scratch instead of being converted--as was Vaughn--from an existing traditional school.

“There’s a real load in putting a school together from scratch,” said Greg Morris, executive director of the National Assn. of Charter Schools.

Students see the school’s troubles, more simply, as a threat to their last chance to make it. They are so concerned about the possibility that Edutrain could close that dozens have been volunteering to call Edutrain dropouts in an attempt to lure them back to campus.

On Monday morning, Tanya Tobar, 17, left her 8-month-old daughter at the school’s on-site child-care center, where student parents work as classroom aides. Tobar dropped out of school when she was 12 “because I was just lazy.” Now, with a young child to raise, she wants something more.

Asked where she would attend school if Edutrain closed, Tobar hesitated and said, “Well, I would have to work to pay for child care. . . . I don’t know how I would do it.”

If Edutrain ultimately closes, it would be the first California charter school to fail since state legislation allowing 100 of the largely autonomous campuses became law in January, 1993. Since then, 76 schools have received charter status, which encourages innovation by freeing schools from state education code requirements while continuing to provide state funding.

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Sloppy bookkeeping and other problems at Edutrain first came to the attention of Los Angeles Unified in May, when a state financial analyst visited the school and found discrepancies between attendance records and the actual number of students on campus.

Chuck Pillsbury, the analyst with the state Department of Finance, said he visited Edutrain and several other charter schools because of their unique nature. Edutrain tries to tailor class schedules to the needs of former dropouts, enabling many students to come to campus only part time and spend other educational hours in independent off-campus and work study programs.

“We just asked a nuts-and-bolts question about . . . what kind of records they keep,” Pillsbury said last week. “I think we all felt that the answers we got were unsatisfactory.”

The attendance discrepancies were later attributed to inconsistent roll taking and documenting, but district and Edutrain officials now agree that that was just one symptom of internal problems at the school that eventually began driving students away.

Edutrain opened in July, 1993, with an ambitious charter that called for serving the district’s rejects: the dropouts, unwed mothers, gang members and ex-offenders. By design, about half of the charter schools across the nation cater to such at-risk students. The other half are more traditional schools--most of them at the elementary level--that parents can choose instead of their neighborhood school.

Serving that troubled student body presents particular challenges, because former dropouts are not inclined to attend school regularly. But at Edutrain, administrators say, they had no difficulty keeping students in class until faced with the onslaught of student referrals after probation officers, churches and community groups learned of the school’s existence.

“I was the big advocate for the growth, pushing everybody to just do it,” said school President Keith Turnage, its top manager. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it differently.”

Edutrain grew from 400 part-time students in January to about 950 part-time students--the equivalent of 500 full-time students--by June.

According to a district audit of the school, completed at the end of September, the school was not able to hire staff quickly enough to keep pace. So the ratio of teachers to students became 1 to 40 or 50, the audit reported. “If students do not get individual attention, they do not come to school.”

The waning personal attention and the resulting administrative turmoil caused a rapid decline in students’ class attendance, Turnage said--back to just 100 full-time students at the start of the fall term. (Meanwhile, the school’s budget and payroll was based on the 500-student high of the spring.)

In a letter to the Edutrain board of governors dated Aug. 16, school director Carlos Barron--who has been running the academic side of Edutrain since its inception--said the school had become “a divided house and oppressive environment.” He called for closing the school until it could be restructured.

Yet math teacher Carlos Caceres teaches his Monday morning pre-algebra class as though nothing is amiss at Edutrain. Caceres was raised in Echo Park and uses his urban background--and his Spanish skills--to relate to his students.

“Hey, you’ve just got to think through this stuff. I know you can think,” he tells one student, who is stuck on a multiplication problem.

The 16-year-old student, Adam Love from Compton, was kicked out of four schools before he landed at Edutrain last summer.

“The other schools, they don’t want me,” he says, declining to elaborate.

Love scratches his head as he works the math slowly, almost giving up twice in frustration, then finally arriving at the answer with Caceres’ help.

“Yeah, OK,” Love says. “OK. I get it.”