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 board room, Los Angeles Unified school 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 were 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.

Initially, San Fernando Valley schools were expected to be losers under the new funding plan, while urban schools would be winners. But as the numbers emerge, it is clear that the outcome will be far more complicated than that.

And, as time draws near to enact the plan, district officials are facing decisions that could hurt some of the schools the agreement was intended to help.

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 at the ACLU. “The ideal remedy would not have been a redistribution (of money); it would’ve been an infusion to all the schools, more to some than to others.”

The 1992 Rodriguez consent decree settled a lawsuit, Rodriguez vs. Los Angeles Unified School District, 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, meaning no schools here feel rich, that 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.”

Board member Julie Korenstein, who represents a swath of the central Valley, cautioned her colleagues that if small schools are not compensated for their size, they will “end up having to let teachers go and they will end up out of compliance with state laws.”

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 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.

They concede that for the actual participants, however, 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 school 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. In the Valley, 45% of schools rank below average for spending, a less stark contrast than some expected, considering the 56% figure for such schools near Downtown.

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 get more than $580,000.

The possible budget boost is not even particularly good news for Emelita Principal Patricia Wedlock. The school had a stable teaching population for years and only recently experienced a burst of retirements. It replaced those teachers with beginners, but Wedlock said she would do the same tomorrow.

“We’re looking for teaching ability and at their philosophy, to see if it fits in with ours,” Wedlock said. “We won’t rule out inexperienced teachers in the future, either.”

While Wedlock said she will enjoy the flexibility to hire whomever she wants, she speculated that reaction to the decree will not be so positive at the schools that have to cut. Indeed, Beth Ojena, the principal at Coeur d’Alene, is less than enthusiastic.

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 campus, about a quarter the yield of an average elementary school. Two-thirds of them are minorities.

Smaller schools spend a larger percentage of their funding on set costs--such as a principal and clerk--than bigger schools. And experienced teachers like Coeur d’Alene’s cost more than neophytes. When those costs are divided by fewer students, 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 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.”

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 school. 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 obvious differences, the group focused their efforts inside the classrooms.

What they discovered there was a 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. Today, about 22% of the teachers in the Valley are beginners, compared with 28% near Downtown and 70% in the Westside/South Bay areas.

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.

Rodriguez became one of those new, uncredentialed teachers the year the suit was filed and he remembers his bravado disintegrating 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.

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.

Roberts points to 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 more 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.”