Burton Enrollment Audit Planned

School district officials said Friday they will analyze enrollment figures at Burton Elementary, where angry Latino parents believe their children have been unfairly placed on a year-round schedule.

The white principal of the school was taunted and beaten in February amid accusations of lack of communication with parents of the 90% Latino student body. He has since been replaced.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials said they agreed to launch an audit of Burton Street Elementary School within the week after parents complained that administrators had reneged on a promise to investigate whether enrollment figures, which dictate year-round calendars, were skewed.

The audit is expected to be completed early next year, officials said.

Parent representative Xavier Flores, president of the Valley Mexican American Political Assn., said the families have little faith the audit will be completed.

“And even if it does, they will be skeptical of the results,” he said.

Because of their dissatisfaction with the district, parents are supporting a study on breaking up the 710,000-student district, Flores said.

“What has become glaringly clear is that the system they work for is so unmanageable that even administrators with good intentions cannot get the school district to comply with the needs of the constituents,” Flores said.

Parents have demanded since July that district officials scrap Burton’s year-round schedule because, they say, it disrupts their families and hinders their children’s education.

About 750 students are enrolled at the school, which has a capacity for almost 700, district officials said.

District policy requires elementary schools to go on a year-round schedule if projected enrollment figures indicate that more than 50 students would need to be bused elsewhere.

Nearly a third of Los Angeles Unified campuses operate on year-round calendars because of overcrowding. Officials said few have ever reverted to traditional scheduling, and no one could recall a change because of parent protests.

“We’ve been waiting a long time for [the audit],” said Julie Korenstein, the Los Angeles Board of Education member who represents the Burton Elementary area.

It took five months for the audit to get underway because the auditing department was focused on the Belmont Learning Complex, the unfinished $200-million environmentally plagued high school downtown.

Korenstein said she would consider putting the campus back on a traditional schedule if current and projected enrollment figures made it feasible.

District officials said they have taken extra care to listen to parents in the wake of February’s attack on principal Norman Bernstein, who was allegedly taunted for being white. Bernstein never returned to the school after the beating.

Among parent complaints is that white school officials do not listen to their concerns, do not speak Spanish and discourage students from speaking it. Parents became further outraged Wednesday when John Liechty, an assistant superintendent for Valley schools, told them it would be impossible to return to a traditional school schedule by the coming semester, Flores said.

Liechty could not be reached for comment Friday.

“The parents are livid,” Flores said. “They are looking at reforms, like turning the school into a charter school, or doing whatever is necessary to take more control of that institution, because it is obvious the district is not going to act in the best interests of their children.”