Schools Ride Ups, Downs of Iffy Budget

I’m beginning to wonder if it has something to do with my kids. It seems that whenever I enroll one of them in a neighborhood public school, the bottom drops out of the Los Angeles Unified district.

Twelve years ago, I sent my daughter off to kindergarten at the public school three blocks away, bucking a trend in my San Fernando Valley neighborhood. Anti-busing sentiment was still strong, and years of bad press about campus violence and district blunders had convinced many of my neighbors that any alternative was better than public school. But our small neighborhood campus was familiar and clean, the kids nice, the teachers competent and kind.

Then the recession hit California. State revenues plunged, and Los Angeles Unified was pushed into its worst financial crisis in history, forced to cut $1 billion--a quarter of its total budget--from its spending during three lean years. Employees took pay cuts. Schools lost lottery funds. Money for everything from books to toilet paper to music teachers to campus police were cut. Classes grew crowded, libraries were closed, bathrooms turned filthy, teachers’ aides were let go. Parents were frustrated, teachers angry, and students seemed lost in the uproar.

And on the day classes resumed after winter break and I found the rickety lunch tables still smeared with dried food from weeks before, I decided to start looking at private schools.

Our campus would eventually recover, but by then, hundreds of families like mine would be gone.

No district in California escapes the knife when state revenues drop, because schools are so vulnerable to our state’s boom-and-bust economy. Ever since Proposition 13 slowed the growth of property taxes, the fate of school district budgets has been lashed to our annual revenues.

In flush years, class size drops, raises are doled out and new books land on classroom shelves. Then comes an era of slash-and-burn, which takes schools years to recover from.

Some districts have found ways to cushion the cuts. When the 24,000-student Irvine district announced its plan to raise class size to cover next year’s projected $5 million shortfall, parents donated more than a half-million dollars to help the district over the hump. When art, music and science programs were threatened two years ago, local corporate and charitable groups kicked in more than $2 million to save them.

But the giant Los Angeles Unified district, with 736,000 students, has no benefactor with pockets deep enough to cover its yawning budget gap. Parents in some affluent areas have tried to blunt the cuts with contributions, but the district often puts hurdles in their way, in an effort to preserve equity--to make sure, in other words, that rich and poor kids suffer equally.

So those who are able often opt to escape, and the loss of funds they would have generated compounds the cuts for those who stay.

We returned to L.A. Unified last fall, when I enrolled my middle daughter in our local middle school. Twenty kids in a class, rising test scores, an expanding menu of after-school classes--it sounded like the district was on a roll. But we didn’t even get a year in this time, before the district began its financial slide.

Tonight the school board will put the finishing touches on the package of cuts required to bring the district’s $5.2-billion budget down to the limit sagging state revenues impose. It is the worst financial crisis since the budget nightmare 12 years ago.

Board members have pledged to try to keep the cuts as far from the classroom as possible. That’s the same rhetoric we heard before. But the reductions add up to $440 million--a number so large it obscures, rather than illuminates, the reality of what is being lost.

The cuts don’t just mean bigger classes, fewer nurses and librarians. They translate to fewer field trips, dirtier bathrooms, longer waits in the cafeteria line. Those air-conditioners we paid to have installed? Good luck getting them serviced. Those lawns our bond money put in? There will be no money to pay gardeners to keep them green.

And as always, the devil is in the details. For example, we’ll save $18 million this coming year by dropping “Mid-Year Renorming of Secondary Schools.” That’s bureaucratese for ending the reshuffling of students that occurs midyear in classes that are too large or small.

That might sound like a good way to save money. But if the cut had been in place this year, my daughter might very well have failed math. Her class grew to almost 45 students last fall, and teaching took a back seat to trying to keep order. Thank goodness the district had the flexibility to bring in another teacher and break up the class. That option would be off the menu next fall.

There are plenty of land mines like that buried in this budget. And its true cost won’t ultimately be measured in dollars and cents, but in disillusionment and defections. And lost chances for struggling kids.

Sandy Banks’ column is published Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.