L.A. Unified OKs $6 Million for Textbooks

Los Angeles Unified School District campuses Monday received nearly $6 million for textbooks as the Board of Education unanimously agreed to begin replenishing woefully inadequate book supplies throughout the state’s largest district.

The funding, available because of increased state allocations for education this year, includes $4.8 million in additional textbook money to begin inching toward Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ goal of a book for every child in every class.

The board approved an additional $1 million of the state windfall to create a book replacement loan fund; schools will be allowed to borrow from the district against their campus materials budget for next year.

Zacarias proposed the new textbook spending after The Times in July documented severe book shortages that leave up to five classes of students sharing one set of books at some schools.

The extra funds represent a 23% increase over last year’s textbook expenditures of $25 million.

“This is very important,” said board member George Kiriyama, underscoring the obvious link between access to books and reading. “Hopefully we can find even more money for textbooks eventually.”

The textbook spending was part of $43 million in additional expenditures that the board approved Monday for the 1997-98 budget. They included funding for library books and aides, additional secretaries and clerks to lift the groaning load of paperwork off administrators and teachers at schools, and an intervention team to dig deeply into what’s gone wrong at the most troubled schools.

Broken down by grade level, the textbook money would provide an additional $4 per elementary school student, $8 per middle school student and $13 per high school student this year. Administrators and board members acknowledge that the amounts are nowhere near enough to fill huge gaps.

But the school board also encouraged Zacarias to lobby the governor and state legislators to increase the state book allocations.

Board member Valerie Fields said the district must “decry discrepancies between the book allotment we receive and the cost of textbooks,” which average $40 apiece.

The Times’ report found many causes of the book shortage, beginning with inadequate state funding and expensive books and ending with questionable local decisions.

At the high school level, where The Times found the greatest shortages and the most crucial need for textbooks, on average just $22 a student was spent last year on books out of a total $72 available.

In response, Zacarias vowed to put a textbook in the hands of every student. He proposed the increased textbook funding as a starting point in mid-September, when 800 principals gathered for the annual back-to-school speech.

He made it clear then and reiterated Monday that he also expected schools to give books priority in spending the instructional materials funds and other discretionary money that in the past has been stretched among books, computers and lab supplies.

Every principal has been asked to inventory books and sign a contract promising to address shortages by buying books first and tightening procedures to prevent loss and theft. The $1-million replacement fund was made a loan rather than a grant, he said, so that schools recognize that they cannot simply ignore the loss issue.

The intervention team included in the $43-million spending plan Monday will target some of the schools where student test scores are chronically low.

Board member Jeff Horton said that $1.6-million expenditure should buy the district some respect.

“It will allow us to address a relatively small number of schools that are in great difficulty,” he said. “We’ve got to show we can do this; it’s an essential piece of [winning] back public confidence.”

As a result of an unprecedented agreement between the teachers’ and administrators’ unions last spring, the team is to be composed of top educators who are to be given special training.

Based on a schedule created as part of that pact, the first campus visits will not begin until next spring.

In other action, the school board:

* Agreed to hire a labor specialist for $100,000 to begin negotiations with building unions. The unions want assurances that most of the Proposition BB school bond construction will be done by union workers.

The action taken Monday does not commit the board to requiring all union workers, but most board members indicated that they would be willing to consider such an agreement if it would not cost the district more money.

* Declared a state of emergency, because of the possibility of a stormy El Nino winter, to allow roof repairs at 30 schools without competitive bidding. The work could cost about $1.2 million, which would be paid through a combination of school bond and state money.

* Added a Human Relations Commission to the ranks of eight district advisory commissions, five of which are ethnic boards ranging from Mexican American Education Commission to the newest, the Armenian Education Commission.

One of the group’s first tasks will be to review the district’s minority hiring quotas in light of recent court rulings in favor of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative approved in 1996.