Upgrade of L.A. Schools Computer System Urged

Although the Los Angeles Unified School district has spent more than $45 million on a new administrative computer system, a critical audit released on Wednesday found that much work is still done by hand by employees who do not have access to the system or were never adequately trained to use it.

The analysis, which was completed a year ago by outside consultants but becomes public for the first time today during a school board committee meeting, recommended 49 immediate changes, including expensive computer upgrades and improved employee training.

“Change will be costly and painful,” stated the report by Deloitte & Touche, “but it will result in significant benefits.” The auditors estimated that it would take a maximum investment of $5.2 million to make the changes, but that expenditure would be outweighed by a minimum savings of $5.8 million a year.

However, a team of district officials appointed to review the audit disagreed with its assessment, contending that it would cost more than $16 million and take up to two years to make the changes suggested by the report.

In a report prepared for this morning’s meeting, the group--headed by Deputy Supt. Reuben Zacarias--downplayed the audit’s findings, contending that while most of its criticisms are valid, the audit ignored the progress the district had previously made in correcting those deficiencies.

“On most parts, we were already in the process of doing what’s being recommended,” Zacarias said. “But we recognize . . . we’re going into a technological age where we’re going to have to make some revisions.”

The outside auditors cited several areas where duplication and time-consuming processes take place. In capital projects, for instance, they found workers entering the same data into two parallel computer systems, which doubled the workload and increased the risk of error. In the contracting area, they found people “physically cutting and pasting information received in paper form” from the purchasing division.

Even for those employees who have access to the district’s newest computer system, inconsistent training--or employees’ failure to participate in the training offered--meant they “do not trust [the system] and continue to use the manual systems that were to have been replaced” by it.

In 1991, the district invested $25 million in a computer system aimed at providing budget and personnel information directly to schools, to support its decentralization efforts. It was the most ambitious of a series of efforts to bring the massive district into the computer age.

Last year, the school board agreed to borrow an additional $20 million to begin to make the system accessible throughout the district.

The district’s budget director, Henry Jones, said his staff does use both new and old systems, but only because the modern system is not completed.

“The accounting side is running, but the budgeting side is not,” Jones said. “We either have it or we don’t, and where we don’t, we use the old processes.”

Jones agreed that more employee training is needed, but said he considers that a natural result of installing any new computer system.

“I think we recognize that everything doesn’t just happen one day when you hit the button,” he said. “As you start using the system, the people using it identify areas they need to know more about.”