Public Schools Scramble to Use New Funds to Cut Class Size

Scrambling to take advantage of millions in state dollars that will be available this year, the Los Angeles Unified School District is drafting plans to cut class size to 20 students per teacher in first and second grades by February.

The effort could mean midyear disruptions in classrooms across the 600-campus system. But officials and teachers say the advantages of much smaller classes in those crucial early grades will far outweigh the problems presented by the massive undertaking.

“It’s going to be a large challenge. There are so many different conditions in our schools,” said Supt. Sid Thompson. “But I believe it is a step in the right direction. I’ve given our staff directions not to look at the glass as half empty but half full, [to ask] ‘How can we make this work?’ ”

To prepare for the change, the district has reopened its teacher recruitment drive to hire an additional 2,000 elementary instructors and ordered 500 portable classrooms, which will arrive in batches of 40 a month starting in September.

On individual campuses, principals and teachers are huddling to come up with new schedules and other solutions that might enable them to lower the average class of 30 students to 20 without having to squeeze bungalows onto already-scarce playground space.

A task force assembled last week to devise plans for the class-size reductions found that about half of the more than 400 elementary schools in the district have enough classroom space for the new groupings that would result. Nearly 120 others have room on campus for portable classrooms.

But the district is grappling with solutions for about 80 other schools, which have been forced by overcrowding to meet on complicated year-round schedules and have no room to accommodate additional portable classrooms.

Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers said one possibility might be to have teachers share classrooms. For instance, two teachers, each with 20 students, could share one room, but stagger their schedules so that all 40 pupils are not present at once.

Teachers at Montague Street School in Pacoima are already considering that scheme, Principal Diane Pritchard said. “We’re really excited about it. We are very creative people in education, and I know there are strategies we can use.”

Another possibility would be to have double sessions and lengthen the school year from 180 to 220 days at those schools, Wohlers said. That would enable schools to have some classes meet in the morning, and some in the afternoon.

It would shorten the number of minutes of instruction in a day, Wohlers said, but add days so that the total number of minutes remains the same as in a traditional school. This would avoid the problem of keeping students on the second shift at school too late in the day.

Some of these options may require waivers from state rules governing education. Susie Lange, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education, said the agency plans to issue guidelines to districts this summer to clarify many issues that have been left vague in the new state legislation on lowering class sizes.

The L.A. district’s goal is to lower class sizes in first and second grades without having to bus more children. About 10,000 students, most of them in elementary grades, now ride buses to campuses outside their neighborhoods because their home schools are too crowded.

But the most daunting challenge may be whether the district can hire enough teachers. Last year, the state licensed only 5,000 new teachers. To meet its needs for smaller classes, Los Angeles Unified alone would consume almost half of the state’s new-teacher supply.

“Where do you find an additional 2,000 teachers? That is going to be a monumental task,” Thompson acknowledged.

Searching out of state is one possibility under consideration. District recruiters are planning to attend teacher fairs in Oregon and Kansas over the next few months, officials say.

But it is likely that many of the new teachers the district hires will be inexperienced and lack full credentials.

Some candidates may enter the teaching ranks through the district’s intern program, which hires college graduates who pass the state teacher qualification exam--CBEST--and complete 120 hours of pre-orientation training. They receive their permanent credentials after two years of successful classroom experience.

Six hundred of the district’s 28,000 teachers are interns, according to Mike Acosta, the administrator in charge of recruitment. In all, about 2,700, or almost 10%, of district teachers have temporary or emergency credentials.

It is possible that some teachers may be lured out of retirement to help fill the gap, said United Teachers-Los Angeles Vice President John Perez. But, short of that, “we’re going to be hiring a lot of inexperienced teachers to put in these classrooms. That’s always a worry. . . . Our concern is a little more urgent now.”

Other concerns, Perez said, are hidden costs of the reduction plan. More portable classrooms, for instance, could mean the district will need more custodians to keep them clean.

The state program will pay districts $650 per student for reducing class size for a whole day, and $325 for half a day. The state estimates that districts may have to kick in $125 more per student to cover the full cost of lowering class size, and many educators fear that even that figure is too low.

Yet Perez said the union fully supports the district’s efforts to cut class size. “Everyone is rolling up their sleeves and saying we’ve got to implement this in the best possible manner,” he said, “because it’s the right thing to do.”