ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : Uncertainty Over Pay Puts Chill on Teachers’ Yule : Education: With no written guarantee that paychecks will arrive Jan. 3, some school personnel are taking a guarded approach to holiday spending and pondering early raids on summer savings.

Teacher Lois Anderson is paying cash for her Christmas presents this year, so edgy is she that county paychecks may dry up next month. Gail King-Burney said there will be no stocking stuffers of music tapes or perfume for her 16-year-old daughter--maybe even no tree.

Other nervous teachers talk about dipping into summer savings months early.

Even normally circumspect school superintendents are publicly voicing anger that Orange County has yet to guarantee that school employees will be paid Jan. 3. Some are predicting that their schools will run out of money by spring unless they can somehow get at millions of dollars saved in the now-frozen county treasury.

“I’ll pay cash instead of charging things,” said Anderson, an eighth-grade teacher at Fred L. Newhart School in Mission Viejo. Anderson, who has two children in college, heads the Capistrano Unified Education Assn., the local teachers union.

“I’m going to buy things I can pay for right now because I don’t want to be facing a huge credit card bill in mid-January or February when the future is in question,” she said.

Top school officials are calling on county leaders to put in writing their promises that the county’s 20,000 or so public schoolteachers will get their next monthly checks Jan. 3. So far, teachers have received only verbal assurances that they will be paid.

“During these difficult times, the last thing we need is for tens of thousands of public employees and hundreds of thousands of their family members to not know the status of their payroll checks from paycheck to paycheck,” said James A. Fleming, superintendent of the Capistrano Unified School District.

County education officials said Sunday that they hope to get written promises in hand as early as today.

“All we’ve had from the county is an oral message (that employees) will be paid,” said John F. Dean, county schools superintendent. “We fully expect their payrolls to be met. But we have no guarantees.”

If the pay issue isn’t headache enough, those in charge of the county’s 31 school districts are already facing a new set of potential problems--how to pay millions of dollars in routine bills, ranging from employees’ medical expenses covered by the schools to the cost of installing computers in a new elementary school.

The money to pay those bills is locked up in the county treasury along with the other assets frozen after the financially beleaguered county filed for bankruptcy last week.

“The county has told us nothing,” said Peter Hartman, superintendent of the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, which has $66 million deposited in the county treasury. “The bottom line is even if we get access to all our property taxes and state aid and federal aid, it will not be enough to keep our schools open through the spring.”

But Dean said that even in the worst case--schools running out of money to pay for paper and lights--the state is required by its Constitution to bail them out.

“The state must provide the education,” Dean said. “It must keep the schools open. And keeping them open means paying the bills.”

Questions over whether the funds will be available anytime soon prompted officials to hold off on plans to put the final touches on a 400-student elementary school in Foothill Ranch over the coming school vacation and move in students after the holidays.

“Students temporarily housed at another school may have to stay there,” Hartman said.

The money now frozen with other county funds includes millions of dollars needed by the self-insured school district to pay teachers’ medical bills. Frozen too is interest income that school planners had counted on to meet operating expenses such as utility bills.

“We have people who may have to go into surgery whose insurance is tied up in the funds,” said Fleming of the Capistrano Unified School District.

Among many teachers, Yuletide planning is taking a back seat to pondering uncertainties about the future.

“I don’t think anybody’s rushing out to spend more money,” said Richard Plum, who teaches math at Westminster High School. “Teachers and county employees, if they haven’t purchased (something) by this time, they probably aren’t going to.”

King-Burney, a teacher in the Santa Ana Unified School District, said she is scaling back Christmas plans because even if the Jan. 3 paycheck comes through, there is no guarantee that other paychecks will follow. The anxiety has taken its toll, she said.

Times correspondent Holly Wagner contributed to this story.