With Education at Risk, Parents Begin Mobilizing

Wendy Tobiska spends hours on the phone, talking to other parents and quizzing school officials about how Orange County’s financial calamity might hurt local schools.

She helps organize parent meeting groups, devours school reports and newspaper accounts about the county’s bankruptcy and has become suddenly fluent in the language of Wall Street. Recently, she attended her first Board of Supervisors meeting, personally imploring board members to protect the schools from any further financial pain.

“If we don’t do it, who else is going to speak for the kids?” says Tobiska, a part-time child-development instructor from Santa Ana and a mother of two children, 9 and 12.

In the eight weeks since Orange County’s financial crisis began, Tobiska and other parents have stepped forward to help school districts across the county. Some have donated money and supplies such as paper and copier toner. Others with financial backgrounds have offered their expertise. Still others have mobilized as a new political force to apply pressure on elected officials from Laguna Beach to Newport Beach to Santa Ana.

More than 1,500 parents have joined a letter-writing campaign organized by Irvine Parent-Teachers Assns. The letters urge supervisors to return 100% of the money local schools placed in the county’s collapsed investment pool and are being hand-delivered to individual board members this week.

Dozens of parents carrying placards reading “Save Our Schools” marched outside Westpark Elementary School in Irvine last week, urging parents to write the supervisors.

“We’re seeing standing-room only at every parent meeting,” said Irvine school trustee Hank Alder, noting that about 400 parents attended a University High School PTA meeting last week.

In Santa Ana, PTA officials have formed a Parent Information Group that includes representatives from most district’s schools. Tobiska and others have been meeting to share the latest intelligence on the financial crisis and then reporting back to parents in their neighborhoods.

“Parents are concerned, and they are imagining the worst,” said Kathi Jo Brunning, president of the Santa Ana district’s PTA. “This is a way of getting them accurate information so they feel included.”

On Tuesday, hundreds of parents are expected to converge on the Santa Ana Civic Center for a 3 p.m. rally to raise awareness about the financial plight of schools. The rally, organized by Tobiska, Brunning and others, is set at the Board of Supervisors’s home turf in downtown Santa Ana, just hours before the board conducts its first night meeting.

“We’re from different cities, but we all are parents concerned about the same thing,” Brunning said. “Everyone is involved in this.”

Every Orange County school district, along with scores of other public agencies, invested in the county pool, which lost $1.7 billion last year and took a 22% hit.

Schools are particularly in a bind because virtually all of their operating funds are funneled through the county treasury and were thus frozen by the bankruptcy.

Five school agencies--the Irvine School District, Placentia-Yorba Linda District, Newport-Mesa District, the Orange County Department of Education and North Orange County Community College District--actually borrowed extra millions to invest in the pool.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge John E. Ryan has approved the emergency release of millions to the schools since the bankruptcy filing, but some districts still say they might go belly-up by April unless they have access to the rest of their funds.

Supervisors Marian Bergeson, Roger R. Stanton and William G. Steiner have said they favor repaying schools 100% of the principal of their investment, even if the county has to incur deeper debt to do so. The board, however, has not yet considered the issue.

As school officials wait for word on how much they will receive, parents have moved to soften the affects of cutbacks by donating money and school supplies.

At the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, officials have published a “Wish List” of needed classroom items from puzzles to computers that parents and others in the community are being asked to donate. As of Friday, the district had received some computers, video monitors, office supplies and educational games.

“Wish Lists” are also being drawn up by parent groups in the Laguna Beach and Capistrano unified school districts.

In Irvine, dozens of parents have responded to an advertisement paid for by district teachers requesting donations of supplies such as paper, copier toner, pens, glue and cleaning supplies. There has even been talk among parents of forming parent work crews to help with light maintenance to save money at Irvine schools.

One explanation for this activism is that some parents consider schools cornerstones of their communities and not simply as government entities, said Elizabeth Thomas, president of the Irvine Education Foundation, a nonprofit fund-raising group.

“They know how important schools are to the future of the community,” Thomas said. “They want to be constructive and help.”

Tobiska, for one, says her new-found activism has taken a toll over the past two months--her home is crammed with school reports and old newspapers, and her family has taken to eating pizza and frozen dinners because there is little time for cooking meals.

But she said the extra efforts will be worth the trouble if she and others can help keep Santa Ana schools from cutting basic school programs.

“I don’t think parents realize how important their voice is,” she said. “If you have enough parents that want something, it gets done.”

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren and correspondents Holly J. Wagner, Russ Loar, Jeff Bean and Jon Nalick contributed to this report.

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