Upgrades of 17 L.A. Schools Planned

Schools Supt. Roy Romer announced plans Thursday to spend $36 million next year to improve education at 17 of the lowest performing high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The money, which would come from various sources, including the district’s general fund, would help pay for more teachers and counselors at the struggling schools, and physical improvements such as updated science labs and libraries.

The funding is designed to jump-start school improvements that would otherwise begin in 2007, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to begin spending an additional $2.9 billion on education.

Romer made the announcement outside Dorsey High in South Los Angeles, one of the schools that would receive the money. He was flanked by five school board members, who still must approve the funding but whose remarks suggested broad support for the idea.

“It’s important, it’s timely and ... it’s extremely necessary,” board President Marlene Canter said.

Romer said the decision to allocate the money was motivated by concern over several issues: the high school dropout rate, the difficulty that many students have passing the mandatory state high school exit exam, and the fact that several of the schools are up for re-accreditation in the next year. Crenshaw High lost accreditation last year, an event that alarmed district administrators and caused them to send teams into the lowest-performing schools to determine their needs.

“When they saw what was happening at Crenshaw, they said, ‘Let’s see what we can do at other schools,’ ” said Dorsey Principal George Bartleson.

He ticked off the ways he could spend more money: reducing the size of math classes, hiring more counselors, teachers and other staff, even hiring a school psychologist to help troubled students.

“These are really, really needy students that you’re talking about,” he said.

Still, Romer and the board members warned that the money should not be seen as a panacea -- both because it is a relatively small amount and because money alone will not improve student achievement.

“This is really ... akin to sending Band-Aids to Baghdad,” said school board member David Tokofsky. “This is really very little money.”

California schools in general spend about $7,500 per pupil on public education each year, compared with $12,000 to $13,000 in the most generous states. The money Romer is proposing to spend would average about $600 per student at the 17 schools, although it would not necessarily be distributed equally.

The targeted schools serve the most disadvantaged students in the district. All 17 qualify for federal Title I funds, which are for schools in impoverished communities, and all but one are more than 99% non-white.

In addition to improving school facilities, Romer said, the money could be used to reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers. It also could go toward hiring more counselors and the staff needed to create the small schools-within-schools that are the district’s goal.

School board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, whose district includes six of the schools, spoke forcefully about the need for more than money to improve student achievement.

“Money won’t make a student come to school every day,” she said. “Money won’t make a student come prepared for school. Money won’t make a teacher teach rigorously, and teach to the best of her ability, and expect that the student can achieve.

“This monetary support is minuscule compared to the human support that we need in this community. We need the parents to step forward, we need the teachers to step forward, we need the students to step forward.”

If they don’t, she said, “next year at this time we’ll be looking for another $36 million to throw down a black hole.”

Romer said the money would come from a combination of state and local funds, as well as money from Measure Y, a $4-billion school construction bond measure approved in November. Portions of it were set aside to narrow the “achievement gap” that divides students by race and economic status.

Besides Dorsey, the high schools named by Romer were Banning, Bell, Belmont, Crenshaw, Fremont, Garfield, Huntington Park, Jefferson, Jordan, Locke, Los Angeles, Manual Arts, Roosevelt, Santee, Washington Prep and Wilson.