Budget Woes Follow Governor on Visit : Government: He goes to inner-city L.A. school touted as a model of how to intertwine preventive services with education. But he finds there is no money to get project off the ground.

Rhetoric and reality clashed before Gov. Pete Wilson’s eyes Wednesday in the neatly spare library of an inner-city Los Angeles elementary school.

Breaking away briefly from budget negotiations in Sacramento to stump for a favorite project, the visiting governor touted his proposal for an intertwined system of education and social services at neighborhood schools. And he pointed with pride to Norwood Street School.

“What you see here is a success story,” Wilson said, describing the “one-stop social center” providing preventive services to students and their parents.

Whereupon newly elected Los Angeles Unified School District board member Jeff Horton begged to differ, loudly.

“There’s no money to do it,” Horton, standing in the library with Wilson, told the governor in the opening shot of a terse exchange.

“We’ve just cut a quarter of a billion dollars (from the school district budget) in Los Angeles. We need resources!”

The one-stop center, it turned out, is not a success story, not yet anyway. Right now it is only a dream, its potential quashed to date by the fiscal difficulties all Los Angeles schools face.

The curt words between governor and local school official underscored a central political truth for Wilson. It is not that school officials object to his innovative plans--even Horton, the governor’s challenger, called them “exactly what’s needed.”

But as Wilson is trying to tug the state’s school systems into new approaches that would benefit future generations, school officials in places like Los Angeles are scrambling to provide the basics to students already in the overburdened schools.

No matter how far Wilson travels from Sacramento, he can still feel the reverberations of budget woes that have shadowed his six months as governor. On Wednesday, indeed, he expressed more than a little irritation at those who demand more money from a state entrapped in a deficit.

“Everything else (in the budget) was actually cut,” Wilson told Horton. “Education was the only . . . “

“Prisons were not cut,” Horton interrupted.

“We don’t release felons from prison, that’s true,” Wilson shot back. “ . . . We’re not going to release any felons. If you want a commitment that we’re going to do that, you’re asking the wrong man.

“We are going to keep the neighborhoods safe but we’re also going to move to a preventive agenda that, if that had begun 20 years ago, would have made a difference in terms of that expanding prison population.”

A governor’s aide said later that Wilson had been told in briefing papers that the one-stop service center he described was up and running, when actually it is not.

Ange Kasza, principal of Norwood Street School for 19 years, said teachers and administrators there have been trying for more than a year to develop a center that would provide preventive services espoused by Wilson, such as mental health counseling, vaccinations and prenatal care, on the school grounds.

But the planning has been stalled because the school has been unable to pay for an on-campus building to house the services. Until the money can be found--and Kasza is hopeful that a private donor will provide it--school workers have been trying to deliver services in a part-time, haphazard fashion.

“We tell them where to go for vaccinations, but they are uncomfortable out of the barrio and as a result they won’t go,” she said. “We spend so much time with abused children--mental health--and sometimes we take them (to appointments). I spend money because I believe in what the governor said--but I’m taking paper and pencil money away to do it.”

Wilson has proposed more than $100 million for new preventive programs in the budget now under debate, but he acknowledged that the proposal would not pay for all of the preventive services needed by Californians.

“The programs that we’re talking about I think need to be expanded until they reach the universe of need,” he said.

Education--and little talk of the turbulent budget negotiations in Sacramento--was the clear theme of Wilson’s half-day in Los Angeles. Before his press conference, the governor visited a classroom of gifted fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, who proudly showed off a class mathematics exercise that involved measuring the size of bubbles blown through tiny straws.

Wilson, looking a bit sheepish, was moderately successful blowing bubbles with two young partners as the assembled cameras whirred.

Earlier, the governor also promoted his preventive care program before several hundred school superintendents gathered for a summer conference at USC.

Wilson decried “dysfunctional parents” who he said were “too strung out” or “too exhausted” to reinforce their child’s education.

“Too many come to school too hungry to learn . . . Too many are caught in the web of drug abuse, alcohol abuse,” he said.

“I’m damned if I’m going to go through four years or eight years without making a monumental effort to change the fundamental condition of children in this state.”