Schools Get OK to Try to Trim More Class Sizes

Los Angeles elementary schools can begin plotting ways to shrink their third-grade class sizes to 20 students after a unanimous school board vote Monday to expand the popular state reform by one grade once a state budget is passed.

But the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District delayed by at least a week a decision on whether to extend the program to kindergarten classes, so members could weigh competing issues of fairness:

Should the district allow schools with space to forge ahead, or would that unfairly penalize crowded schools, many of which are in the poorer areas of the city?

The class-size reduction reform, part of an initiative launched last summer by Gov. Pete Wilson to improve basic reading and math skills, quickly spread to include 98% of the district’s first- and second-grade classes. While Wilson has promised to boost spending on the program to $1.5 billion, the Legislature has yet to approve the 1997-98 state budget.

On Monday, board Vice President Victoria Castro said although she supported third-grade class-size reduction, she could not advocate allowing schools to make further reductions this year because not all schools have the space.

“I’m . . . very tired of the stale rhetoric of equity, equity, equity,” retorted board member David Tokofsky, who pushed for schools to be allowed to decide.

Underlying that debate is a looming battle with kindergarten teachers, many of whom oppose an alternative plan advocated by district administrators to effectively reduce kindergarten classes for half of the day by teaming teachers for up to an extra hour daily.

Seven kindergarten teachers spoke to the board about the proposal and all opposed it, saying teachers would be exhausted and children slighted.

“Shared time in kindergarten is not 20 to 1,” said Shawn Buckingham from Woodlake Elementary in the West San Fernando Valley. “Our classes will still have 30 to 35 students in a cramped room, with a high noise level.”

Currently, morning kindergarten teachers help their afternoon counterparts for an hour a day and vice versa. Under the proposal, which did not appear to have majority support Monday, that partnership would be increased by at least 40 minutes, allowing the district to qualify for half of the $800 per student the state allocates for reducing a full day.

That proposal also appeared to lack the support of a newly emerging school board majority, which includes Tokofsky and two other former teachers--Valerie Fields and board President Julie Korenstein--and former adult school principal George Kiriyama. All but Kiriyama were elected with significant backing from the teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles.

A union survey of elementary teachers last year found a that majority opposed the team teaching plan, but board President Day Higuchi has recently acknowledged that it may be a viable option, and the union is reluctant to stand in the way of the popular reform.

Decisions about how to approach the second year of the reform are complicated by the same harsh geographic realities that led the district to limit the option to the first and second grades last year.

Although there are many exceptions, a preliminary district review indicates that generally more space is available at schools in middle-class neighborhoods and less in poorer areas.

Allowing more freedom of choice could actually damage inner-city schools’ ability to recruit enough third-grade teachers to carry out the reform, said board member Jeff Horton.

“Let’s be honest,” Horton said. “You’ve got an opening in the Palisades for a kindergarten teacher because you’re reducing class size there and then you’ve got an opening in a crowded . . . inner-city school. It’s going to be hard enough to find enough teachers to do this.”