Fund Offer May Not Be Big Help to All Schools

Gov. Pete Wilson’s ambitious plan to offer school districts financial rewards for reducing elementary-level class sizes has been warmly welcomed by most school districts, but it may only marginally help Orange County’s most overcrowded schools.

Wilson signed a bill Monday making $771 million available to schools that cut class sizes in kindergarten through third grade to 20 students by next February. Most classes in the primary grades average about 30 students.

County school officials have hailed the move as a major step in school reform. But some have added that changes will come slowly and with more difficulty for districts with major overcrowding and minimal space and money for expansion projects.

“We don’t have the room to get all our kids in,” said Roberta Thompson, superintendent of the 19,000-student Anaheim City School District, which is creating more year-round schools to address its increasing problem of overpopulated classrooms.

Just last week, the district opened a new school, Jefferson Elementary, a year-round campus that is already over its 800 capacity. Jefferson, with 1,100 students enrolled, is the district’s first new school since 1967.

“Our barrier is a lack of facilities,” added Thompson, whose district’s student population has been increasing by about 1,000 annually. The district has resorted to buying “portables,” or temporary trailers, to house students in past years.

“We don’t even have the space for portables. . . . As you keep adding portables and are increasing staff, there is still the same number of support facilities, such as restrooms, for too many people. You have to remember, portables are just a temporary structure. We need more permanent solutions too.”

Santa Ana Unified, the county’s largest district with 50,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students, also opened a new school, Martin Luther King Elementary, on July 9. Also a year-round school, King is accommodating about 750 students in a facility suited for 600.

Because overcrowding is a continuous problem in the Santa Ana and Anaheim City districts, school officials said they face hard work in finding the space and money to make smaller classrooms possible.

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Santa Ana would need to purchase about 120 portable classrooms and hire 180 teachers for first and second grades in order to cut class sizes. How to fulfill those needs is the challenge, he said. Bennett said he does not expect to implement such changes by this fall.

In response to the concern of Santa Ana and Anaheim City, a governor’s spokesman advised schools to become “creative.”

“If schools are willing to be creative, this will work,” Wilson press secretary Sean Walsh said. “We believe the old saying, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ We modify that with: ‘Where there’s a buck, there’s a way.’ ”

While Santa Ana is slowly looking into class-cutting solutions, other districts have been scrambling to implement programs in time for this fall. Schools can receive money under the funding initiative if they reduce class sizes by February.

Under the bill, school districts implementing a classroom-reduction plan will receive $650 per student, provided the district kicks in $125 per pupil to reach the estimated $775 it would take to educate each student in a classroom of 20.

The money must be used to lower class sizes in the first and second grades, although districts have the option of applying the money to kindergarten and third grade as well.

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The new law also provides $200 million that would help school districts buy up to 8,000 portable classrooms, budget analysts said.

Major manufacturers of portable classrooms said they annually produce on average 3,000 school portables throughout the state and doubt school districts will actually be able to pay for and operate that maximum number of portable classrooms by the fall. However, orders for portables are definitely up so far, they said.

“The class size reduction plan has created an incredible demand,” said Mike Hemming, president of the Perris-based Aurora Modular Industries, the second biggest portable classroom builder in the state. “We anticipate that our volume will double.”

School districts with more money and space than Santa Ana and Anaheim City have been able to plan for smaller classrooms in the last few months.

Capistrano Unified, for example, approved a plan shortly after Wilson proposed the class-size agreement in May. Capistrano Unified administrators said they are making use of all the space at their schools.

“We are creating multipurpose rooms out of stage areas, dismantling computer labs and using them for classrooms and putting computers in these classes,” said Capistrano Unified spokeswoman Jacqueline Price.

The Westminster and Los Alamitos unified school boards also have passed classroom reduction plans. Saddleback and Irvine schools are seeking to win their boards’ approval to cut class sizes by hiring more teachers and buying more portable classrooms.

Other methods of creating more space include adding partitions to larger classrooms to make new rooms, converting teacher work rooms, day care centers and parent learning centers into classrooms, and building “teaching stations” where classes will be rotated.

The high demand for hundreds of new primary grade teachers, however, may not be met because of a teacher shortage. About 20,000 new teachers would be needed by September to address the needs of all state school districts, officials said.

Last year, however, the state fully certified only 5,000 new teachers. Including substitutes and teachers who had been working with temporary credentials, the state gave new, permanent credentials to 13,300 instructors.