Reading, Writing, Ruin : Ravaged by time, vandals and a lack of money, public schools are starting to look like war zones. With little or no budget for repairs, the children are suffering the consequences.

On a recent fall day, many of the 3,200 students at Benjamin Franklin High School in Highland Park walked to class, as they have for more than a year, past glass- block windows shattered by bullets, pellets and rocks. Across the way, they passed two empty classrooms charred a year ago by arsonists. They milled around lockers, more than 100 of which were bashed, broken or burned--and unrepaired since 1978.

A boys’ bathroom reeked, its stench sometimes reaching the attendance office, students said.

The day was warm and cloudless, but one student described the campus as “gray and gloomy.” The Los Angeles Unified School District hasn’t once repainted the school since it was rebuilt in the 1960s. The older gym, heated with radiators from the 1930s, has no air conditioning. Three on-site custodians have been lost to cutbacks and until last week, no full-time gardener had tended the 19-acre, multitrack, year-round campus. The principal waits weeks for maintenance help after reporting needed repairs and watches his fix-it list grow longer every year.

Neighbors in an affluent pocket look down, both literally and figuratively, on what ideally would be considered an oasis of hope. One mother said, “Most of the people in Mt. Washington don’t want their kids to matriculate at Franklin. They will sell their homes and move rather than go to this school.”

But rather than the exception, Franklin, through no fault of its own, is becoming typical of hundreds of regional public schools ravaged by time, vandals, lack of money and a generation of trade-offs.

“Many of the schools built in the ‘50s and ‘60s were built to last 30 years,” said Larry Picus, associate education professor at the University of Southern California and a school financing specialist. “Thirty years is up.”

Even for those unaffected by earthquake damage, the deterioration is accelerating due to increased use and shrinking budgets.

The roof at Utah Street Elementary School in Boyle Heights has been leaking for years. “They do come out and repair it and then after a while, it happens again,” said Principal Dee Dee Mynatt.

Already this year, fifth-grade teacher Paul Delaney has had to place protective plastic over eight computers he purchased himself to protect them from the rain. But this was nothing new. Last season, he said, “at one point every night I had to push every table with a computer on it to what I hoped was a safer part of the room.”

The teacher does not blame his administrators. “This is a fact of life in this district.”

The sprawling LAUSD has accumulated $600 million worth of deferred maintenance projects. “We’re only funded at one-third of what the needs are,” said Margaret Scholl, director of maintenance and operations for the district. “We spend less than any other major school district by far, and less than any school district I am aware of in the country on maintenance.”

Doug Brown, the current head of LAUSD’s Facilities, Asset and Management division, recently warned board members that without additional funds, “that $600 million will grow to $900 million, that $900 million will grow to $1 billion. Pretty soon you have to shut down schools and where are you going to put the kids?”

Across the country, with the exception of newer suburbs, the angle of deferred school maintenance projects is becoming “sharper and sharper,” said researcher David Honeyman, director of the Center for Educational Finance at the University of Florida. “Every year you don’t fix something, it creates additional problems that need to be fixed.”

Indeed, in September, school officials in Washington, D.C., were forced to delay opening 164 public schools in order to fix 4,000 fire code violations including defective boilers, old, faulty wiring, clogged sprinklers and unworkable windows.

With 700 fewer custodians than it had five years ago to care for its 800 schools, the LAUSD deals with maintenance on an emergency-response basis only, Scholl said. District painters are scheduled so rarely that when Maria Tostado, principal of Garfield High School, was told they were coming next in the year 2048, she wasn’t sure if they were kidding or not. In fact, it takes 30 to 40 years for a school to get painted on the outside, said Bob Hamms, director of technical services for the LAUSD. Interior paint jobs “would be over 100 years given the current level of funding,” he said.

Some worry that dilapidated buildings pose potential hazards and liability. Others cite a “Catch-22” situation in which facilities’ rapidly declining worth may jeopardize the district’s ability to borrow money to solve the problem.

But others suggest children are paying the price already. Said LAUSD board member Barbara Boudreaux: “It sends a strong message to children. Very strong. ‘We don’t care about you.’ ”

According to one 17-year-old Franklin senior, “Education should be No. 1. It’s the future. But it’s like the district or whatever is not going to be around in the future. They’re just thinking about now, about themselves. It’s like they don’t think about us being deprived is like the end of the future.”

She said she and other members of the school’s drill team and cheerleading squads come to school on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon to clean up the school. “It seems like we have to make a difference if the district isn’t going to help.

“It seems like conditions are getting worse and worse,” she said. Once as part of a class project, she said she wrote to Gov. Pete Wilson about the problems. She said she received no reply.

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Almost routinely, after weekends or holidays, Andy Parker, a physical education teacher at Le Conte Middle School in Hollywood, finds human feces left by weekend soccer players behind the gymnasium near his office. “Kids aren’t supposed to go back there, but they do,” he said.

One day, a pile remained inside the locker room for hours before it was reported to a janitor. But before it was removed, Parker said, “Some (student) grabbed it and rubbed it all over the door. I think that message was, ‘Hey, why do I have to step over this to go to class?’ ”

Because he says he has a reputation as a complainer, Parker has begun bringing his video camera to work to document what he sees: his office broken into and sprayed with graffiti, broken and boarded up windows, open ditches, trash that piles up in drifts. “You see liability around every corner,” he said.

Parker said some teachers are so disgusted by the environment, they transfer out as soon as possible. At first, he said, his attendance dropped off. “Then all of a sudden, I realized the kids really cared about me. It seemed to matter to them if I missed a day . . .

“That’s the only thing that makes me go back,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, these kids out of all the kids are the best, the sweetest, the nicest, the most submissive. Your heart gets torn. . . .

“I think I’m in the armpit of the world,” Parker said. “But substitutes say Le Conte is not the worst.”

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Many Compton schools, built as part of the 1930s Works Progress Administration, are named for U.S. presidents or educational leaders. One has a memorial plaque to a long-forgotten local hero who “gave his life for democracy” in 1918, three years after the school was built. But now the schools “more resemble Third World schools than schools in Los Angeles,” said Jerome Harris, an administrator appointed this year by the state Department of Education to oversee the debt-ridden and nearly bankrupt Compton Unified School District.

Some schools have boarded up the rotten buildings the district can afford neither to fix nor tear down. In one of the closed buildings, a middle school teacher once fell through the floor, its supports undermined by gophers, Harris said. One high school pool has been unusable since the 1987 Whittier earthquake.

At Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School, built in 1922, parents have gamely painted the facade and planted colorful flowers. But the windows that are open won’t ever close and the windows that are shut won’t open. Some doors have no knobs. The toilet stalls have no doors. Principal Jackie Cochran said the sewer backs up once a quarter. But she said, “We can’t sit down and wring our hands. We have a building that’s standing up.”

At Franklin Whaley Middle School, three sections of classrooms were torched by vandals twice during the past year. They stand charred and decorated with cobwebs as children chant lessons in portables nearby. On the threshold of the charcoal remains, graffiti broadcasts a bathroom-style sentiment about a teacher.

“We try to be an oasis out here,” said Principal Charles Littles. But the damage “shakes their sense of security. A lot don’t feel secure. A lot don’t have good parenting.”

Besides money, the officials say, what the community needs most are higher expectations, neighborhood success stories and education. “Without education,” Littles says, “they’ll still be pushing grocery baskets in 15 years.”

Moved by horror stories in other inner cities around the country, many of them related by Jonathan Kozol in his book, “Savage Inequalities” (Harper Collins, 1992), federal lawmakers have begun to take notice. Led by U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.), this year they commissioned the General Accounting Office to study the physical conditions of the nation’s schools. The report, due in January, will also consider whether a school’s physical environment affects student achievement or teacher turnover.

Also this month, Congress for the first time allocated federal funds--$100 million--to help school districts repair facilities that pose a health or safety risk to students.

That sum doesn’t begin to match the huge backlog of school repair projects in Los Angeles alone, not to mention those of the nation, estimated at between $200 billion and $300 billion.

But many believe money alone is not the answer. They cite issues of staff competence, bureaucracy, priorities or “spirit.”

Said LAUSD board member Boudreaux: “You can’t begin with us at the board, or any federal government, or any state government. It has to start at that school site. If you tolerate filth, you’re going to have filth.”

Even some schools in the most blighted neighborhoods have beautiful campuses, she said. “You can see a school, two or three blocks from another, one is filthy, one is clean.”

It’s a matter of setting high standards and instilling pride at the school site, she said. “Somehow, we have to heighten the sense of ownership” among parents, staff and community leaders. “We can’t let the students off the hook, either,” she said. Workers who must clean up trash have less time for cleaning hallways or replacing light bulbs.

Some say older, middle-class suburban schools may even be worse off than poorer schools because they do not receive special state and federal funds.

Even at Mt. Washington Elementary, teachers plaster the walls with artwork to cover up flaking and chipping paint. “The water that comes out of the pipes in the teachers’ lounge you would not want to drink. It’s rusty and gray,” one mother said. “But we have to make coffee and punch with it.”

But unlike less affluent areas, the Mt. Washington parents have formed a booster club, a nonprofit corporation to raise more than $1 million to build a multipurpose room and four more classrooms.

“It’s way beyond what parents ought to be doing,” the mother said. “The idea of a parent group in an elementary school raising over a million dollars to build a facility is ludicrous. The state is obligated to do this. And yet, you can’t stop them. The people say, ‘We’ll never get any money here to build the facility.’ ”

Similarly, schools in other areas have reportedly raised $75,000 to $100,000 a year and used in-kind donations and services to perform their own repairs and upgrades--especially air conditioning.

Four years ago, Joan Mark, principal of Carpenter School in Studio City, organized parents to paint the school and install air conditioning. The parents planted a rose garden and now also replenish the earthquake supply bin each week. “We chose a color scheme with the children,” she said. “Some have blue walls, some have literature characters. You come in and you smile. It’s clean and neat and shiny.”

At Garfield High School, where students still use temporary bungalows that were scheduled to be removed after World War II, parents also come on campus each weekend to paint out graffiti. Sometimes the paint is paid for by the district, sometimes by the boosters, and sometimes by the student body. They also believe it is not their responsibility, but as community volunteer Lupe Robles said, “We don’t want our kids to feel like second-class citizens.”

Nevertheless, the striking discrepancies between what can be accomplished in the have and have-not neighborhoods prompted one GAO official to predict school facilities will become the “issue of the ‘90s, replacing desegregation in terms of equity.”

According to USC’s Picus, “The fact still remains if Beverly Hills needed a bond measure, they could do it for a much lower tax rate than Baldwin Park. So it’s very difficult to pass a bond measure and build a school.”

Over a generation, standards have shifted and facilities declined so gradually, that many have become inured to their surroundings. Some parents say they have learned to accept less.

But those who live with the problems every day call it a crisis desperate enough to require radical solutions.

According to the LAUSD’s maintenance director Scholl: “We can’t just let things continue. You can’t depend on the goodwill of people forever. You can’t forever take care of the fires.

“At some point you have to address the issues.”