Funding and Fairness Clash in Public Schools

The pledge card looks like a thousand others. It suggests contributions of $50 to $2,000, with options to pay by installment or credit card.

It’s the cause that might come as a surprise: your local public school.

“Our teachers rely on Booster Club funds to pay for teachers’ aides, our physical education, drama and video programs, our technology program and our music program,” reads the cover letter from the Westwood Charter School Booster Club.

Then comes the clincher, a blunt reminder that a well-funded public school is cheaper than a private school:

“If you have ever even considered sending your child(ren) to a private elementary school, you know how much you are saving.”

In a time when vouchers and charters seem to blur the distinction between public and private education, parents in many parts of the Los Angeles Unified School District are further altering the concept of the public school by dipping into their own pockets.

Parents have long used candy drives and carnivals to raise money for such things as band uniforms and student awards, but today’s fund-raising goes much further--far beyond the limits theoretically set by school district regulations.

Those rules are aimed at maintaining some balance between schools in poorer neighborhoods and those in wealthier ones. But fear of alienating middle-class parents has led district officials to give considerable leeway in enforcing the regulations.

By providing their children’s schools with benefits that are not available to others, parent fund-raising groups raise a dilemma for educators: how to build community involvement in schools and cultivate new sources of support without violating the principle that public schools should provide equal opportunity to all.

“They’re helping kids out, which is a good thing, but when it compromises basic equity issues, then it becomes problematic,” said Ted Mitchell, vice president of education at the J. Paul Getty Trust and Mayor Richard Riordan’s education advisor.

Under a court consent decree, Los Angeles Unified substantially reduced financial advantages once enjoyed by schools in affluent areas. The goal is to ensure that no more than $200 per student separates schools at the low end and high end of the spending range.

Interviews and a Times computer analysis of $6.8 million donated to Los Angeles Unified schools show that many Westside and San Fernando Valley campuses are, in effect, busting the formula.

The Westwood Booster Club, for instance, raises about $225,000 annually, President Sam Skootsky said. That works out to about $325 per student.

In the same league are booster clubs at Warner Elementary School in Holmby Hills and Serrania Elementary School in Woodland Hills, which each raise about $200,000 a year.

Generally, the groups continue the traditional activities such as sales and carnivals. A direct appeal taps another segment of parents who don’t have time for worker-bee activities.

“Frankly, if it takes us around 350 volunteer hours to get a return of $5,000, that’s not a successful fund-raising avenue,” said attorney Jeffrey Cohen, who heads the booster club at Serrania.

Its very appeal to the middle class means that the pledge drive divides neighborhoods based on wealth.

“I will not in good conscience ask parents to make donations,” said Miriam Rumjahn, principal of Hillside School in Lincoln Heights, where 95% of the students qualify for subsidized lunches. “I would put them in a very embarrassing bind.”

A long-standing school district policy states that “no donation shall provide a substantial advantage in educational benefits to a school if such benefits cannot be balanced in all schools.”

Today, however, concerns about middle-class flight and sentiment for breaking up the school district have made district officials reluctant to interfere when parents rally to the aid of their children’s school.

Limits on What Private Money Can Provide

District General Counsel Richard K. Mason said the rigid preoccupation with equity that characterized the 1970s and 1980s has given way to a new ethos.

“As time has gone on, we feel that the school system needs all the tools it can get,” Mason said. “It is hard for us to say no to people who want to improve their own schools. It puts us in a semi-totalitarian role. I think we’ve given that up.”

District officials say they preserve equity by limiting how private funds can be spent. Class aides and specialists who work beside regular teachers are acceptable. New full-time teachers are not.

Last year, a parent at Ivanhoe Elementary School in Silver Lake started a mail campaign seeking $525 from each family with a third-grader. The plan was to raise $64,000 in salary and benefits for a teacher to reduce class size in the fourth grade next year.

School officials rejected the plan on the basis that the extra teacher would give Ivanhoe students a fundamental advantage. They said Ivanhoe parents could hire a teacher to work beside classroom teachers, but not conduct separate classes.

The parent, Marylou Dudas, isn’t going for it.

“I’m very disappointed,” Dudas said. “People want to help the system, but [it doesn’t] want to be helped. They’re just bogged down.”

But lawyers who have battled for years to reduce inequities in school spending say the district is already going too far in seeking to accommodate wealthier parents.

The lawyers view instruction in art, music and, particularly, employment-related subjects such as computer technology as core academics, whether or not they are conducted in separate classrooms.

Peter Roos of Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy Inc., a San Francisco law group, said he would consider going to court to stop private fund-raising if he thought it upset the current spending balances.

“As long as they remain relatively modest, we have felt it was unlikely that a court would be very welcoming of a challenge,” he said.

But a school that raised $200,000 would definitely be over Roos’ line.

“Raising that sort of money and being able to spend it on that sort of a core educational program is questionable, and it strikes me that the district ought to limit that sort of thing,” Roos said.

The rise of philanthropic fund-raising for public schools can be traced to two statewide policy shake-ups of the late 1970s. Proposition 13 shifted the burden of school finance from local taxes to the state, and a series of court rulings held that unequal public spending on education is unconstitutional.

The revised system of education finance was more evenhanded but less bountiful. Every year since 1980, California has spent less per pupil than most other states.

The diminished funding touched off an explosion of private nonprofit foundations, largely in wealthy communities such as Beverly Hills and Newport Beach, that mostly seek to supplement school district budgets by reaching out to businesses and residents.

In Laguna Beach, the Schoolpower foundation has raised $6 million for an endowment and several school programs since 1981.

Observers say a factor in the success of such foundations is the number of students they serve. People tend to give more freely in small school systems such as the 2,500-student Laguna Beach Unified, where they can see their money working directly for campuses in their neighborhoods.

Unlike smaller districts, sprawling Los Angeles Unified has no foundation because there is no coherent parent community to solicit on behalf of all its 660 schools.

Instead, booster clubs have become full-scale fund-raising organizations at some schools.

For many families weighing the choice between private and public school, the extras afforded by a strong booster club can tip the balance, offering a competitive program for much less money.

“You’re trying to build a school that is as strong as a private school,” said Cohen, president of the Serrania booster club.

Acknowledging that there will always be some unfairness, district officials have chosen to get on the bandwagon of parent fund-raising as a positive force accessible to every school, no matter what its socioeconomic status.

Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers, who is responsible for planning and research, said the district’s decentralized organization is meant to encourage entrepreneurship and competition at the school level.

n Unfortunately, the district makes no effort to keep track of schools’ nonpublic funds, and the limited evidence available suggests that most schools are not as competitive as Wohlers would hope.

Of the $6.8 million in private donations recorded with the district, most was concentrated among a few schools. Only 26 generated $100 or more per student, all but four in the Westside or the Valley.

Many Donations Are Off the Books

Of the district’s 27 school clusters, the five that make up the Westside and West Valley accounted for 43% of the money. The cluster including Hamilton, University and Palisades high schools had the most--nearly $1 million.

The actual disparity is probably even greater, however, because many schools are not required to report their donations to the district and some don’t.

The computer record, for example, shows only $282.58 spent last year by Warner Elementary School, although the booster club nets about $180,000 annually, said President Micki Sauer.

Because the club is incorporated as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, it can pay directly for services, and consequently, doesn’t need to record its income and spending with the district.

The equalizing effect of corporate money is apparent in only a few cases, such as that of Wilmington Elementary School.

Two nearby oil refineries whose donations total about $120,000 pay the salaries of a psychiatric social worker, aides to oversee club meetings before and after school, and an attendance consultant.

Despite the potential unfairness of private fund-raising, some school reformers think the practice is destined to become an integral part of public school financing in kindergarten through grade 12, as it has long been at the university level.

Times staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report.