L.A. Schools Given $200,000 for Textbooks

The board of a prestigious foundation Tuesday voted to donate $200,000 to buy textbooks for the Los Angeles Unified School District and to contribute its expertise to curb the district’s chronic book shortage.

The California Community Foundation, which led the campaign to restock the Los Angeles Library, will announce its grant today, along with a massive fund-raising campaign. The public will be asked to support the new Schoolbook Partners Fund by buying as little as one book for $35, a whole classroom’s worth for $700 or a library shelf full for $1,500.

The grant--the first significant private contribution to the district’s textbook crisis since The Times revealed massive shortages in July--includes an agreement between the district and the foundation to form a public-private advisory group charged with thoroughly researching causes of the shortfall.

Foundation board member Virgil Roberts and Bill Ouchi, chairman of the district’s LEARN reform program, will serve as co-chairmen of that panel, which intends to determine methods for improving the book purchasing and safeguarding systems at schools.

“If you think about education as being fundamental to the quality of your community and you read about kids in school now who don’t have books to study, you think, ‘Well that’s just going to be a wasted year of their life,’ ” Roberts said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that this problem will be solved.”

Roberts’ confidence is based less on the organization’s significant fund-raising capabilities--which included gathering $12.7 million to replenish books lost in the Central Library fire a decade ago--than on the formation of the advisory committee.

The advisory panel also intends to work with school districts in Inglewood and Compton, offering them up to 20% of the public contributions received by the foundation. In each case, members will be looking for solutions rather than assigning blame.

“We are not interested in . . . pointing fingers,” said foundation spokesman Allan Parachini. “But we know that lack of money is not the only cause, that at some schools the problem is there is not a rational process for spending the money that’s available.”

The foundation, which began as an outgrowth of Security Pacific Bank’s trust department, has assets of $300 million and last year awarded $32 million to community causes ranging from health clinics to education reform groups.

L.A. Unified welcomed news of the donation and the advice. “We can’t fix it all by ourselves, so it’s great to have people with expertise who are willing to help us out,” said school district spokesman Brad Sales.

The original Times story on the shortfall pointed to a complex web of causes for the lack of books at many schools, ranging from inadequate state funding to fierce campus competition for learning materials funds.

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In response to the story, Supt. Ruben Zacarias vowed he would put a book in every student’s hands and allocated an additional $5.8 million this year from the district’s general fund for textbook purchases. He also ordered schools to spend more of their available learning materials money on books.

In addition, an independent fund-raising effort headed by a CBS vice president has raised a reported $25,000 for books at Fremont High, the campus featured in the Times story. That money is to be delivered at a school scholarship assembly Dec. 2.

Teri Corigliano, CBS publicity vice president, said she was able to raise $13,000 in individual donations from friends and co-workers, which was boosted by $10,000 from the CBS Foundation. Columbia TriStar Studios added to cast contributions from the “Gregory Hines Show,” and “Chicago Hope” made a separate group contribution.

Everyone who contributed had a story about books, Corigliano said. “The big memory a lot of us had was when you would cover your books, how that was a big project, the neat corners and all. And we realized how far kids are removed from even doing that today.”

For its donation, the California Community Foundation is dipping into a memorial fund earmarked for education and health purposes left by Los Angeles accountant Ralph T. Morris in 1968.

The foundation has asked the school district to identify for immediate attention up to 10 schools that have already depleted their textbook funds for this year and have desperate shortages.

“We want to knock the worst of the flames down now,” said Parachini. The grant is intended to run only through June 1998, at which point the foundation hopes to have devised a plan for preventing future shortages.

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Among that first tier of worst-off campuses is likely to be Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles, where the announcement is to be made this morning. The school recently estimated that it was 7,000 books short.

Because book loss is one of the major problems identified by principals, the foundation is proposing that retailers and fast-food outlets popular with young people provide gift certificates that could be issued when books are returned. Attempts also are being made to set up book return locations in the community, because another cause of book loss is students abruptly moving from school to school.

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How to Contribute

* Tax-deductible donations to the Schoolbook Partnership Fund can be made in increments of $35 to:

California Community Foundation, 606 S. Olive St., Suite 2400, Los Angeles 90014

* For further information, call: (213) 310-CHARITY, or search the foundation’s Web site at https://www.calfund.org