L.A. Schools Wrestle With Realities of ’92 Money Pact : Education: Deadline nears for equalizing campuses’ funding. A shrinking state budget complicates decisions.

Sitting in their high-back chairs in a wood-paneled boardroom, Los Angeles Unified School District board members began playing Robin Hood on Monday, searching for the least painful ways to take from the richer schools and give to the poorer.

Although it was their first tentative foray into the controversial terrain, their actions had been choreographed more than two years ago, when the district entered into a landmark legal settlement to achieve equality among almost 600 schools by fundamentally changing the way it funds them.

But now, as the time draws near to enact that funding plan, district officials are facing decisions that could hurt some of the schools the agreement was intended to help. And even the plan’s most avid supporters have begun to wonder how much fairness will result, particularly in a time of shrinking state education budgets.

“It’s not going to do what it set out to do because at the beginning the pie was larger,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “The ideal remedy would not have been a redistribution (of money); it would have been an infusion to all the schools, more to some than to others.”

The 1992 Rodriguez consent decree settled a lawsuit filed six years earlier by public interest law firms on behalf of a group of Latino and black parents who accused the school system of shortchanging their children by spending less to staff and maintain their campuses.

When it became clear that there was no money to build new schools, the lawyers set their sights on equalizing spending--between the suburban and the urban, the whites and the minorities--by giving every school the same amount of money per student to pay for teachers and administrators.

But redistributing the wealth is tricky, especially when California ranks toward the bottom nationally in school spending rates, meaning no schools here feel rich, and all turn their pockets out just to run basic educational programs.

At Monday’s meeting, school board members found themselves grappling with just one small piece of the decree: the politically touchy task of subsidizing smaller schools, which tend to be penalized by the decree’s per-pupil formula.

Under one plan they are considering, larger schools would be docked to help pay the administrative costs of smaller schools. Board members clearly had mixed feelings, based in part on how their own schools would fare.

“I am very reluctant in any way to subsidize small schools,” said Jeff Horton, who represents Hollywood and Mid-Wilshire, “since I believe being small is such a wonderful advantage already.”

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Nationwide, dozens of states--including California--already equalize funding among school districts. But Rodriguez is the nation’s first court order requiring fiscal equality among schools within a district.

School funding experts, many of whom also view per-pupil budgeting as a key element in the next wave of education reform, are watching the agreement’s application with great interest. For them, Los Angeles--with its broad ethnic, economic and geographic diversity--provides the perfect laboratory, the Rodriguez decree a reasonable experiment.

However, they concede that for the actual participants, there will be many rocky moments during the phase-in period between now and the fall of 1997, when the district must achieve compliance in 90% of its schools.

“In school finance you create winners and losers and fights in all arenas, because it involves money--quite often important money and lots of money,” said Mary Fulton, an analyst with the reform-minded Education Commission of the States.

Los Angeles school board members know they face a minefield of controversies:

They must find ways to bring the highest-spending campuses into line quickly without angering the powerful teachers union, which agreed to the decree only after promises that no teachers would be forced to transfer.

They must calm angry voices from schools that complain that 80% of the district’s $4.5-billion budget is outside the control of the settlement, allowing many schools to gain under Rodriguez while also receiving millions of dollars for extra services for underprivileged students.

Complicating their tasks are the numbers themselves. When the district completed the school-by-school tallies in December, it discovered potential winners and losers were not cleanly divided along urban/suburban lines.

Although a greater percentage of the 262 schools that stand to gain are located in inner-city areas than in suburbia, geographically the results are skewed mightily by school size, staff longevity and other factors.

Such peculiarities landed Coeur d’Alene Elementary--which serves poor and homeless children in Venice--near the top of the list, faced with a potential loss of $120,000 a year. Meanwhile, Emelita School in well-to-do Encino ranked among the lowest spenders and could gain more than $580,000.

“I surely understand the idea behind Rodriguez and I think it’s a noble concept,” said Beth Ojena, the principal at Coeur d’Alene. “But it’s a flawed decree. . . . Sometimes I just shake my head.”

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Coeur d’Alene is a tiny school by Los Angeles Unified standards. On any given day, fewer than 200 students show up at the tidy beige and blue building, about a quarter of the number of an average elementary school. Two-thirds of them are minorities and about 40 walk there from a homeless shelter eight blocks away, sometimes shoeless, often angry, usually with little prior schooling and no transcripts.

It is a school any equity arrangement would seem to favor. But Coeur d’Alene stands to lose and lose big under Rodriguez.

Smaller schools spend a larger percentage of their funding on set costs--such as a principal and clerk--than bigger schools. And experienced teachers such as Coeur d’Alene’s cost more than neophytes. When those costs are divided by fewer students, using the Rodriguez formula, Coeur d’Alene lands near the top in per-pupil spending.

Like most principals, Ojena has few options to bring spending down. She can hope that some veteran teachers leave, cut back on classroom supplies or divide her time--and salary--between two schools.

District officials “said maybe, if by the third year you can’t get in line, we’ll give you two schools,” she said. “I thought, ‘Then I’ll ask for a transfer.’ I don’t need that.”

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School inequities hit Ron Rodriguez in the face like an icy washcloth in 1980, when he traveled to the San Fernando Valley for a carpentry job.

“I’d see these schools--with nice buildings and big play areas--I thought, ‘I didn’t know they had schools like this,’ ” said the Eastside parent, for whom the decree was named. “Then, I came home to see the playground space at my kids’ school was disappearing under relocatable classrooms.”

Rodriguez helped form a group called Padres Unidos, which prevented the district from targeting only inner-city campuses for year-round schools. Then they set out to improve their children’s access to quality education.

At first their lawsuit focused on the physical plant, and attorneys spent weeks surveying campuses--flushing toilets, counting library books, measuring green space. Then, as it became clear there was not enough money to address such differences, the group focused their efforts inside the classrooms.

What they discovered was teacher flight of epidemic proportions. Brand new instructors without any experience--and frequently without credentials--filled classrooms in the city’s core. Those who stuck it out and gained seniority transferred to the suburbs.

That picture has shifted somewhat since the Rodriguez case was filed, partly because of contract rules that reward teachers who stay in a school eight years.

Implementing the Rodriguez decree may continue that trend, by allowing poorer schools to hire more experienced teachers--or to use the money to train their existing staff--and forcing richer ones to hire beginners.

It is well-known among new teachers that--because turnover is higher in schools near Downtown--”you take a string with a pencil on the end and draw a circle with a 10-mile radius from the center of the city,” said Day Higuchi, vice president of the United Teachers--Los Angeles union. Inside that circle “is where you tend to go.”

Rodriguez became one of those new, uncredentialed teachers the year the suit was filed, and he remembers that his bravado disintegrated as he faced a class of 30 unruly kids. He swiftly became convinced of the validity of educational research showing it takes at least five years to become a competent teacher.

“The only thing I had was a little Spanish and a B.A. . . . It really humbled me,” he said. “No matter how good my intentions, unless you’re skilled and trained how to engage kids, not just lecture, they don’t listen.”

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As one of Los Angeles’ leading education reform advocates, Virgil Roberts is among those pushing hardest for per-pupil funding as an essential component of school site autonomy.

But as a middle-aged African American raised in Ventura County with precious few black role models, he worries that the Rodriguez decree’s narrow focus on teacher experience levels could coax young minority teachers out of inner-city areas where they are needed most.

Minority teachers “know how to communicate with (minority kids) better than an older white teacher might . . . They feel a responsibility to the community,” said Roberts, a businessman who serves on boards for two major reform projects--LEARN and the newly formed Los Angeles Metropolitan Project.

Roberts cites past agreements that have had undesired effects, particularly the resolution of a 1976 order filed by attorneys for the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, which sought to desegregate Los Angeles’ teaching staffs.

Hundreds of minority teachers were transferred to the San Fernando Valley and Westside, while hundreds of white teachers were ordered to move to inner-city schools. Statistical faculty integration was achieved, but the urban schools lost dedicated teachers and some of the transferred white teachers refused to move, forcing minority schools to rely on substitutes.

Although Rodriguez would not allow mandatory transfers, figuring out how to prevent similar erosion is likely to be debated in coming months.

Those most optimistic about the decree’s ability to make a difference in Los Angeles schools say it will be a catalyst for sorely needed discussions.

“In the public debate, there’s usually very little sympathy for low-income people and . . . for black and Latino people,” said attorney Lew Hollman, with San Fernando Valley Legal Services. “At least this establishes the principle.”

Among the more creative proposals being floated are establishing financial incentives for teachers to stay in urban schools, improving working conditions there, and creating mentor-teacher arrangements where younger teachers would be grouped with an experienced colleague.

Others agree with Roberts that the underlying problem is not the decree, but the inflexibility of governing by legal action, which looks at inputs instead of outcomes--in this case, how much money is going into schools instead of whether students are learning.

“The problem is, lawyers can’t do school reform,” said Roberts, who is an attorney. “For a judge, it needs to be subject to court order and easy to review. You’re not going to get a judge to say, ‘We need children to learn.’ The monitoring would be humongous.”

* $15 MILLION FOR SCIENCE: Los Angeles schools are beginning a federally funded effort to remake science and math instruction. B1

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School Spending

Under the settlement in the Rodriguez v. Los Angeles Unified School District case, the district has until fall of 1997 to bring spending on teachers and administrators at more than 560 schools in line with the average it spends per student districtwide. This year, spending averaged $1,406 per elementary student, $1,584 per middle school student, and $1,681 per high school student. Schools that are above those limits have been instructed to begin filling staff vacancies with lower-paid less-experienced teachers, and those below can add higher-paid veteran teachers.

Schools spending above and below districtwide average

ABOVE AVERAGE BELOW AVERAGE URBAN SCHOOLS 44% 56% SUBURBAN SCHOOLS Westside/South Bay 69% 31% San Fernando Valley 55% 45%

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CUTTING THE MOST

ELEMENTARY AMOUNT PER STUDENT ENROLLMENT TOTAL CUT Bellagio Newcomer, BRENTWOOD -$709 358 $253,822 Coeur d’Alene, VENICE -$663 185 $122,655 Playa del Rey, CULVER CITY -$557 196 $109,172 MIDDLE SCHOOL Burbank, HIGHLAND PARK -$365 1612 $588,380 Pacoima, PACOIMA -$285 1568 $446,880 Marina del Rey, MARINA DEL REY -$264 761 $200,904 HIGH SCHOOL Wilson, EASTSIDE -$187 2023 $378,301 Banning, WILMINGTON -$169 2503 $423,007 Fairfax, FAIRFAX -$166 1803 $299,298

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ADDING THE MOST

ELEMENTARY AMOUNT PER STUDENT ENROLLMENT TOTAL INCREASE Emelita, ENCINO $362 456 $165,072 Crescent Heights, WILSHIRE DIST. $305 218 $66,490 Parmelee, SOUTH-CENTRAL $286 1576 $450,736 MIDDLE SCHOOL 32nd Street School/ USC Perf. Arts, SOUTH CENTRAL $556 926 $514,856 Mid-city Alternative, MID-CITY $400 332 $132,800 Mann, HYDE PARK $312 1318 $411,216 HIGH SCHOOL Downtown Business Magnet, L.A. $366 850 $311,100 L.A. Center for Enriched Studies, MID-CITY $343 1477 $506,611 Bravo Medical Magnet, BOYLE HEIGHTS $251 1660 $416,660

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District