L.A. Schools Face Another Lean Budget : Education: Hint of 4% pay cut for district employees surfaces as school board starts work on 1995-96 figures. Wider distribution of ‘school improvement’ funds OKd.

Los Angeles school board members dipped their toes into the 1995-96 budget waters Monday, hashing out seemingly small financial details that will profoundly affect the way money is distributed in the massive district.

They also faced a grim possibility: All school district employees could find their paychecks shrink 4% next year if the $4.2-billion budget previewed Monday is the one adopted. That reduction would be half of an 8% pay cut restored in last year’s budget.

However, almost everyone--from the district’s finance director to the teachers union president--predicted that money will be found to offset at least part of that $80-million salary cutback. The 1995-96 budget estimates are conservative, they said, based on a worst-case state budget.

“We don’t know if we’ll have a shortfall or a surplus or we’ll be in the middle . . . depending on how the state budget plays out,” said board President Mark Slavkin.

While angry at what she called administration “grandstanding” over salaries, United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said she is so confident more money will be found that she plans to ask for a raise for her members.

“I’m not that upset about it,” Bernstein said. “We have no doubt there is enough money.”

Money that is hoped for, but cannot be counted on until the state budget is finalized in late June, includes a statewide cost-of-living raise promised by Gov. Pete Wilson when he presented his budget this year, reimbursement for integration expenses requested from the state, additional building maintenance funds also mentioned by the governor, and possible increases in school lottery revenues inflated by a rush to win the larger recent jackpots.

Nevertheless, the 1995-96 school budget will be lean, offering little wriggle room for innovation. Yet several changes are afoot that follow public education’s vogue of improving equity among schools and shifting budget responsibility to the school level.

Approved Monday:

* Spreading $33 million in state “school improvement” money among all 444 elementary schools instead of only among the 388 that have applied and been selected in the past. The decision also requires State Board of Education approval.

* Releasing control of utilities and maintenance budgets to the first spate of 34 LEARN reform schools and requiring that those same campuses maintain a balanced budget beginning next year. In the past, the district absorbed some cost overruns under the new per-student LEARN formula if they amounted to less than the school’s total budget before implementing reforms of Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now.

* Offering a subsidy to smaller schools to help them comply with a court settlement that strives to even out spending for teachers and administrators among 560 district schools. Otherwise, the formula forged under the Rodriguez Consent Decree--which must be enforced at 90% of the campuses by fall, 1997--would have penalized smaller schools for the unavoidable administrative costs of a principal and office assistant.

After the board’s vote on these and several other similar budget measures, Slavkin criticized district administrators for introducing the ideas piecemeal. “It feels like we’re building it from the small upward,” he said. “We need to see the big picture in its entirety . . . so we’re not continually arguing about the small details.”

This year, the school improvement funds--less than 1% of the district’s total budget--received the most attention from the public and the board.

Even though grants to individual schools are small, the state-financed program is among the few truly supplemental funding sources in a cash-strapped district. At the schools that were chosen in the past, it has been used for such relative luxuries as teacher’s aides and library books.

Questions have long been raised about how the schools were anointed, and a task force formed to study the program found that the choice was largely based on which applications arrived first.

“There’s no rationale I can think of to explain to a school that is getting zero why they are getting nothing,” Slavkin said Monday.

The task force’s proposal to phase in all elementary schools over the next two years, along with some middle schools, drew dozens of parents, principals and teachers to the boardroom beginning in February.

Some even came from schools receiving grants, which stand to lose some funds as such money is spread more thinly.

Of the board members, only Julie Korenstein on Monday questioned the wisdom of making the per-student allocation of special improvement money the same at all schools.

She recommended instead that a sliding scale be established, with priority given to schools that do not receive other supplemental money, such as federal funds for poor students.

In the end, Korenstein voted with her colleagues for the changes, but only after reminding them that--with Rodriguez decree requirements, the LEARN budget-balancing and the special improvement changes--”this is all coming down at once (and) some schools are going to be really wounded.”