$5.2-Billion School Budget Plan Detailed

The Los Angeles schools budget proposed Thursday by Supt. Roy Romer would reduce staff at the district’s central and outlying offices, rein in spending on special education and slow the hiring of high school teachers.

It also would pay for nearly 500 “coaches” at a cost of $40 million to train teachers to better teach math and reading in elementary and middle schools.

The $5.2-billion budget, which the Board of Education will begin examining this weekend, is the first round of a 2001-2002 budget that is expected to climb toward $9 billion by its completion in August.

The second round is funded by strictly controlled U.S. and state dollars, leaving the Los Angeles Unified School District with little discretion over how to spend the money.

In the current school year, L.A. Unified estimates it will have overspent its 2000-2001 budget by $153 million by running through the district’s surplus, spending more than it planned to on special education and extending an 11% raise to teachers.

“Now we’ve got to pay the piper,” Romer said.

Stressing that his proposed budget leaves L.A. Unified’s core programs intact, Romer has proposed “painful sacrifices” that include reducing the district’s central office budget by as much as 20% in some departments, or $52.7 million. In L.A. Unified’s 11 local districts, which were created last year to decentralize many of the 711,000-student district’s functions, $12 million in staff and programming would be cut.

L.A. Unified also will look for savings in its special education budget, by holding funding at current levels for 82,000 students with learning disabilities and other special needs. To avoid the overspending that has occurred this year, Romer said, special education will be better managed and more services will be provided in-house.

“We’ve got to take care of student needs, but sometimes there are less costly ways to do it,” he said.

Finally on the list of major cutbacks, high school programs are to be cut by more than $17 million because of a change in the calculation that L.A. Unified uses to fund its campuses.

Because funding would be based on a school’s average attendance over a year, rather than on attendance at the beginning of the school year, some high schools would have to get rid of teachers and programs. In many schools, however, any reductions in faculty because of the new funding formula would be offset by projected enrollment growth, which comes with more teachers.

Romer and his staff insist that class sizes will grow only minimally and within acceptable levels.

He also proposes to spend millions to pay coaches to train teachers in kindergarten through eighth grade in core subjects, which he called an urgent need.

“The emphasis is to prepare kids better so when they get to high school they have better skills,” he said.

With the cost of those coaches, and even with the proposed spending cuts, the district still is searching for $27 million to complete its operating budget. If state funds do not close that gap, L.A. Unified will take a second look at possible cuts.