ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : O.C. Schools’ Fiscal Woes Magnify Their Differences : Education: One suspends a field trip. For poorer districts like Santa Ana’s, it means ending computer labs.

For children at one school, Orange County’s fiscal crisis means a fun science field trip may be called off.

For children at another school, the crisis means cutting computer labs and after-school classes for which there were long waiting lists.

While every school in the county perceives the budget disaster as a sinister threat, different items are being threatened in each of the districts.

“We’re circling our wagons,” said Barbara Smith, assistant superintendent in the Capistrano Unified School District, voicing a contentiousness common among county educators.

But even as besieged districts cling to a sense of “us” against “them,” the crisis sometimes sharpens their differences.

“It’s a function of where you had your extra resources,” Smith said.

At Capistrano Unified’s Castille Elementary School in Mission Viejo, for instance, extra resources were designated for a $20,000 science field trip filled with hands-on experiments and moonlight hikes. The trip now dangles by a thread because the funds for it were tied up in the county’s depleted investment portfolio.

Capistrano Unified officials won’t call the trip dead--not after parents staged countless carwashes and bake sales to raise the money.

But, by contrast, Santa Ana Unified School District officials say they’d love to have a $20,000 field trip to cancel.

The field trip they were forced to cancel for many of their schools this week was a visit to nearby Rancho Santiago College, where fifth-graders and their parents were to be given a short, no-frills tour of one post-high school opportunity.

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Santa Ana Unified officials said Friday that developments in their district are more dramatic than canceled field trips. They conceded for the first time that their schools are slashing after-school classes and extra tutoring.

“My kids were real excited about (the Spanish classes),” said an angry Kathi Jo Brunning, head of Santa Ana’s Parent-Teacher Assn. “Some of their friends are either bilingual or speak more Spanish than they do English, so this was an opportunity for them to communicate better.”

Gaylen Freeman, Santa Ana Unified’s assistant superintendent for business, said such opportunities are relics of a freer era.

“We have frozen everything at this point, other than basic, essential programs and expenditures,” he said. “All purchase orders come to my desk. And if they weren’t emergencies, they weren’t going anywhere.”

Freeman said his district has been massaging its budget for the last three years, because of hard economic times. So he and other Santa Ana officials, unfortunately, know how to respond to a financial crisis.

“We are a basic district,” he said. “We have basic programs. We’ve had significant reductions over the last three years. We’re not in a position where we can say we’re cutting any frills.”

In fact, Santa Ana’s largest elementary school, Martin Elementary, has canceled “intercession”--lessons offered during long recesses. The extra teaching is now deemed a luxury, said Roxanna Samaniego Owings, Martin’s principal.

“It’s been temporarily suspended,” Owings said. “I don’t like the word canceled.”

Such a defiant attitude not only helps districts cope, it often blurs the differences among them.

“It’s like a family in crisis,” Smith said. “It’s like when Hurricane Andrew hit, but you can’t see the damage. The reason you can’t see the damage is, we’re seeing in our school district--this may sound very Pollyanna, but it’s very true--we’re seeing people pull together and saying, ‘We’re not going to let it defeat us.’ ”

Smith still holds out hope, for example, that Castille’s science field trip can be saved.

“The county and state need to make us whole,” she said. “The county had no right to take that money.”

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Some Capistrano Unified officials and parents say the science trip is irrelevant and misleading. They insist that their predicament is no less gritty than Santa Ana’s, and may even be worse.

“If you were a (Capistrano) principal doing second-semester ordering,” Smith said, “where you might be ordering extra art supplies, some new playground balls, a new net for your volleyball, instead you’re going to order paper, pencil, chalk. And you’re going to keep your Xerox toner, but you’re going to try not to make copies of some particular lesson and give one to every student. Now you’re going to put it on the board and have them copy it.”

Capistrano Unified Supt. James A. Fleming said his district receives less state money than Santa Ana does, so it has less to cut.

“We have no librarians, no nurses, no guidance counselors,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff we can’t cut because we don’t have it.”

By the time the budget crisis has played itself out, Fleming predicted, Capistrano Unified will be forced to make adjustments just like those Santa Ana made this week, and more.

Either way, parents and school officials said, children will suffer because of financial dealings they don’t understand.

Smith said: “Eventually our country has to decide that when a disaster like this befalls an institution which is trying to serve its future--kids--that they need to at least put us on the same range as Chrysler and the S&L;’s.”

Instead, she added, “What you see on CNN is a picture of John Wayne’s house on Balboa Island, like that’s how we all live, and isn’t it funny that all these people are out of money?”