Eye on School Consultants

The Los Angeles Unified School District is like a medieval castle, constantly under siege. Now, just as the inhabitants are making progress on repairing their crumbling fortifications--pushing up test scores, shrinking overcrowded classes, building desperately needed outposts--the black plague of a state budget deficit hits.

Gov. Gray Davis’ budget plan succeeds in protecting the money to pay for what are considered essential education costs, for example, teachers and textbooks. But the shrinking state coffers still mean less money for so-called optional expenses, and some costs, such as education for the disabled, are rising. So today, the Los Angeles school board will grapple with how to cut $45 million from its $5.2-billion budget.

The members have made many tough decisions: They have raised the average class size in the fourth through 12th grades to 40 or more students, doubled the number of failing second-graders in remedial classes, slightly increased the size of special-education classes. They have even more unhappy choices to make.

But the district’s children and parents should rise up in revolt if school board President Caprice Young and her six colleagues don’t scramble to simultaneously staunch the hemorrhaging of funds from within.

One way to do this is to ask the district’s inspector general to aggressively audit every outside consultant and contract and justify each penny spent.

As things stand, the district pays $104million to outside consultants and contractors, not even counting those hunting for sites for new schools, making repairs on campuses and protecting environmental health. All should be examined.

The consulting approach, initiated in part to import outside expertise and deflate the LAUSD’s notoriously bloated bureaucracy, can work well. Excellent retired teachers, for example, return to help poorly performing teachers improve--and the district doesn’t have to pay additional benefits.

But using outsiders can also waste money, as Inspector General Don Mullinax documented in his investigation of the Belmont Learning Complex, where conflicts of interest and appallingly bad advice cost the district millions.

Now the board should tell Mullinax to set up a contract audit unit to do background checks, analyze winning bids to avoid expensive change orders, make sure the LAUSD has good billing and cost-accounting systems and examine invoices and work before final checks are cut.

These savings will go only so far toward protecting the LAUSD’s long-suffering students and teachers from additional hardships. But crowded classrooms and dirty schools would at least be easier to take without the nagging suspicion that district officials are squandering cash on consultants with better connections than skills.