Latest School Budget Cuts Hit Where It Hurts : Education: In past years, school districts have pared the fat. Now they have had to eliminate some of the essentials.

By HOWARD BLUME

Aug. 1, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Schoolchildren across Southeast Los Angeles County will have a little less to look forward to when they return to class from their summer break.

There will be fewer nurses and librarians in Long Beach, fewer guidance counselors in Whittier, fewer teachers in Montebello, and fewer field trips, music and art classes in general.

Southeast-area schools, like others statewide, are feeling the effects of a drop in state funding combined with restrictions imposed by Proposition 13 on school districts’ ability to generate new revenue.

As a result, numerous school administrators began this spring’s budget review staring at balance sheets tipped the wrong way.

A handful of districts, such as Long Beach Unified and Compton Unified, had made their most painful program and staff cuts last year or the year before.

For the others, this was the year that demanded the unthinkable. This was the season of the unkindest cuts of all, those that promised to affect children’s education directly.

In the Montebello Unified School District, officials cut $20 million, more than 15%, from their original budget.

“I’ve seen many budget cuts,” said Eleanor Chow, a Montebello board member since 1971. “We’re down to the bare bones on this one. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Montebello laid off 142 teachers, including Javier Martinez, a bilingual language arts and social studies instructor with eight years of experience.

“Emotionally, it was kind of hard to teach the last few days,” said Martinez, who taught at Bell Gardens Intermediate. “I had kids walk into my room crying. They were crying about all the teachers who were leaving.”

Martinez must compete for a new job with, among others, more than 1,500 teachers let go by Los Angeles schools. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, has asked its remaining employees to accept a 3% pay cut if they earn more than $25,000 a year.

The teacher layoffs and program cutbacks are particularly damaging to the growing number of students who enter school unable to speak much English. Districts typically release teachers with the least seniority first. Yet these recent hires constitute much of the districts’ bilingual staff.

“We need some of those teachers desperately,” said Glenn Sheppard, the Montebello district’s acting business manager. About 12,800 of Montebello’s 33,000 students speak little or no English.

In some cases, educators find themselves slashing bilingual programs they have worked years to establish, programs they say they need more than ever. The Downey Unified School District cut its bilingual coordinator. And Lynwood Unified has reduced its bilingual education staff.

The Little Lake City School District, which serves Santa Fe Springs and Norwalk, will no longer provide teachers to give one-on-one or small-group tutoring to students learning English.

“Forget about the money issue; it’s a question of how much damage you are doing to bilingual students,” the laid-off Martinez said. “I’m bitter not only as a teacher, but as a Latino who sees that Latinos . . . are going to get the short end of the stick.”

In fact, there will be less help for students all around.

At a time when community leaders are calling for increased anti-gang efforts, the ABC Unified School District, which serves Artesia, Bellflower and Cerritos, has cut costs by eliminating a Sheriff’s Department program aimed at gang prevention and drug education.

Montebello closed down its summer recreation program, and the Los Nietos School District, which serves the Whittier area, terminated its after-school recreation programs. Both cuts killed alternative activities for potential gang recruits.

Health services for students will also suffer. The nursing staff was trimmed by about 22% in the ABC district, 20% in Montebello and 60% in the Whittier Union High School District. The Long Beach school board voted to reduce its nursing and library staffs through attrition by the equivalent of about four full-time positions. The Paramount Unified School District cut all four district nurses.

“Thousands of students are without health insurance or regular care providers,” said Sandy Sanders, the Long Beach district’s director of nursing services. “Our kinds of kids are immigrants and poor. They don’t speak English. They don’t understand preventive health care. If we’re cut at all, the student will feel the loss of benefits. Youngsters can’t learn if they are absent or in pain, no matter how good the education system is.”

Laid-off nurse Elizabeth Hichens, who worked at Pioneer High School in the Whittier Union district, says she always thought of a school district as the most stable of employers.

“I thought I would be really secure. I was shocked when I found out we were being let go,” said Hichens.

The Whittier Union High School District also cut its guidance services districtwide by about 10%. The district eliminated a career-assessment counselor and an administrator and closed the library at Frontier High School, the district’s alternative school for students not succeeding in a regular high school.

In the reshuffling, Assistant Principal Thomas Roberts lost his job. So did his wife, Betty, who operated the library and worked in the career-assessment program. Between them, the Robertses have worked for the district for 35 years. Both will be transferred to lower-paying positions that will decrease their combined salaries by about $20,000 a year.

Betty Roberts will get a clerical job. Thomas Roberts, like other administrators who have seen their jobs disappear, will return to teaching. Many districts are using a similar strategy with their employees who hold teaching credentials. Not only administrators but librarians, art and music instructors and reading teachers are being reassigned as regular classroom teachers.

ABC is making classroom teachers of its librarians, and replacing them with library technicians. Such technicians, who earn less than librarians, can help students check out books but have not been trained to teach library and researching skills.

Until June 30, Montebello had a fully trained librarian in every elementary school. No district in the region had better-staffed library services. All 17 positions were cut as of June 30, leaving the job of managing research materials to teachers and parent volunteers.

As a result of the Long Beach district’s reductions, some librarians may split their time between two or three schools.

“My concern is the long-range impact of this,” Long Beach librarian Don Kroll said of the cuts in his district. “Our students learn respect for a library by having one available.”

Added duties for teachers go beyond helping out in the library. In numerous districts, teachers will confront larger classes. In Montebello, the size of the average high school class will increase by six, to about 42 students, according to the local teachers union. Class size in the Los Angeles Unified School District will rise by three students to about 39 students per class in junior and senior high school.

Teachers in the Lowell Joint School District, which straddles the county border near Whittier, will have to get by without two-thirds of their teacher aides.

“They’ll have fewer reading groups if the teacher is in there alone, and the kids will get less individual help,” said Esther Ota, a laid-off teaching aide.

“The teachers will feel a lot more pressure,” Lowell Supt. Ronald Randolph said. “There will be fewer hands to give the students.”

The Whittier City School District eliminated funding for music teachers, and the job of introducing students to rhythms and melodies will now fall to classroom teachers.

“If you don’t have a music background, it’s rather intimidating to have to teach it,” music instructor Nancy Reid said. Reid will become a classroom teacher next fall after 14 years of heading the district’s music program.

School music concerts in the spring and fall may prove a casualty, which would be a shame, Reid said.

“Once most children leave elementary school, very few have a chance to be on stage in front of people,” Reid said. “It’s great for self-esteem. It’s a pleasurable memory that stays with them forever.

“I take issue with the implication that music is a frill,” she said. “It’s getting to the point where . . . if something seems enjoyable, we say, ‘They don’t need that.’ ”

Administrators in the Los Nietos district reluctantly decided that their elementary school students would have to abandon a tradition cherished since 1957: a weeklong field trip.

At a camp in the desert or mountains, students studied conservation techniques, plant and animal life, erosion and the stars. Recreational activities included a night of skits about conservation or science issues performed and written by students.

Leo Grijalva, the Outdoor Education Program coordinator, hopes the program’s disappearance is only temporary. (The field trips were previously suspended for a few years after Proposition 13 passed.)

“I can’t say that it’s an extra,” Grijalva said of the trips.

“Our district is not affluent,” he added. “If the program had to be put on a basis of ‘you pay or you don’t go,’ possibly half or more than half of the families could not afford it. Many of these kids have never been away from home.”

All districts have cut back on field trips, given the gravity of other needs. Downey also eliminated salaries for the coaches of the high school debate team and academic decathlon team as well as the coaching stipends for junior varsity soccer, volleyball and wrestling.

Hard-hit Montebello showed the effects of lean times well before the spring semester concluded in June. At Bell Gardens Intermediate, the district began knocking out walls to accommodate larger classes. At Montebello Intermediate, the music teacher spent $144 from his paycheck to repair the school band’s bass. Out of her own pocket, a science teacher fed the snakes, guinea pigs and hamsters in the science lab to keep them from starving. And a group of teachers pooled their own money to maintain a school subscription to the Weekly Reader.

Paper towels had practically disappeared. An art project had to be curtailed for lack of paint. A field trip planned to reward high-achieving social studies students had to be canceled.

An administrator began regularly locking the teachers’ workroom to safeguard its diminishing chalk supply from teachers in need.

Supply and maintenance budgets are always among the first to take hits, officials said.

“We don’t paint as often or clean the floors as often, and the place begins to deteriorate,” ABC Assistant Supt. Patricia Koch said. “But sooner or later you can’t cut those things anymore, and you turn to school site services like nurses and teachers.”

Wherever possible, budget directors have trimmed with sleight-of-hand techniques. The El Rancho Unified School District, in Pico Rivera, is asking students to bring their own gym towels. That will save $54,000. Montebello and Los Angeles unveiled early-retirement incentives so they could replace high-salaried veteran teachers with lower-paid, less-experienced ones.

Downey reduced the number of buses it must operate by staggering elementary school starting times. The money saved wasn’t sufficient, however, so the district ultimately increased its walking distances. Hundreds of elementary school students will lose their ride to school as a result.

Downey board member Robert Riley does not look forward to seeing the effects of the cuts. “We were forced into doing something that’s not in the best interests of the well-being of the children in this district,” he explained to an audience of parents, teachers and students at a recent board meeting.

Fellow board member Donald LaPlante agreed: “We’re not only going to have schools with no frills, but we also lost some of the essentials.”

Community correspondents Marilyn Heck, Justine Sahli and Tony Dodero contributed to this story.

How Schools Have Been Affected by Budget Crunch*

District (Enrollment): ABC UNIFIED (21,000)

Budget: $86 million

$ Amount Cut: $3 million

Layoffs: 6

Program Cuts: Cut nighttime custodial services in half; eliminated employee fitness program; cut seven of 10 librarians; laid off five of 23 nurses; eliminated Sheriff’s Department program aimed at gang prevention and drug education.

District (Enrollment): BELLFLOWER UNIFIED (10,000)

Budget: $27.5 million

$ Amount Cut: $500,000

Layoffs: 0

Program Cuts: Cuts in field trips, staff development, employee travel and consultant services.

District (Enrollment): COMPTON UNIFIED (27,300)

Budget: $123.6 million

$ Amount Cut: 0

Layoffs: 0

Program Cuts: Avoided cuts this year as result of more than $10-million cut in previous two years, including substantial employee layoffs. In midyear began a hiring freeze and increased class size.

District (Enrollment): DOWNEY UNIFIED

Budget: $60 million (15,100)

$ Amount Cut: $2 million

Layoffs: 14

Program Cuts: Increased walking distances and after-school transportation fee for athletes and band members; cut reading teachers; reduced health services; reduced elementary hours of instruction; cut team coach for academic decathlon and debating teams and junior varsity coaches for soccer, volleyball and wrestling.

District (Enrollment): EAST WHITTIER CITY (7,500)

Budget: $29 million

$ Amount Cut: $1.4 million

Layoffs: 7

Program Cuts: Canceled summer school; eliminated coordinators for bilingual education and gifted-and-talented program; reduced library service, increased class size; delayed salary increases tied to seniority.

District (Enrollment): EL RANCHO UNIFIED (10,500)

Budget: $42.3 million

$ Amount Cut: $3 million

Layoffs: 25

Program Cuts: Eliminated after-school recreation program at three middle schools; reduced numbers of maintenance workers and teachers’ aides.

District (Enrollment): LITTLE LAKE CITY (4,100)

Budget: $16.2 million

$ Amount Cut: $1.2 million

Layoffs: 36

Program Cuts: Cut specialists for teaching reading, English, gifted students, art and music as well as elementary school counselors.

District (Enrollment): LONG BEACH UNIFIED (71,000)

Budget: $350 million

$ Amount Cut: $5.1 million

Layoffs: 0

Program Cuts: Library and nursing services reduced as those staffs cut by attrition; some classes increased in size; cut costs by reorganizing and eliminating some positions.

District (Enrollment): L. A. UNIFIED (630,000)

Budget: $3.9 billion

$ Amount Cut: $241 million

Layoffs: about 1,900 (1,400)

Program Cuts: Increased high school class size by average of three students; reduced employee benefits; approved salary cuts for employees earning more than $25,000 as well as unpaid furloughs of up to five days and suspension of seniority raises.

District (Enrollment): LOS NIETOS (2,020)

Budget: $8.4 million

$ Amount Cut: $320,000

Layoffs: 5

Program Cuts: Eliminated outdoor education program for fifth-graders; cut after-school sports for middle school; eliminated home-to-school transportation for about 50 students.

District (Enrollment): LOWELL JOINT UNIFIED (2,600)

Budget: $11.3 million

$ Amount Cut: $1.56 million

Layoffs: about 43

Program Cuts: Cut working hours and thus pay for 21 employees; layoffs include three teachers and 40 instructional aides.

District (Enrollment): LYNWOOD UNIFIED (15,500)

Budget: $56 million

$ Amount Cut: $3.75 million

Layoffs: some possible

Program Cuts: Established a modified hiring freeze; reduced supply budget; combined some departments, potentially reducing service in areas such as bilingual education.

District (Enrollment): MONTEBELLO UNIFIED (33,000)

Budget: $132.6 million

$ Amount Cut: $20 million

Layoffs: 192

Program Cuts: Cut 142 teachers; cut all elementary school librarians; cut nurses 20%; increased class size; cut summer recreation.

District (Enrollment): NORWALK-LA MIRADA UNIFIED (19,250)

Budget: $79.5 million

$ Amount Cut: $2.6 million

Layoffs: 6

Program Cuts: Reduced custodial and administrative services; eliminated elementary resource aides, technical education aides, media resource teachers and textbook clerks.

District (Enrollment): PARAMOUNT UNIFIED (12,800)

Budget: $47.7 million

$ Amount Cut: $2.5 million

Layoffs: 62

Program Cuts: Cut all four district nurses; increased class size; reduced guidance services and maintenance.

District (Enrollment): SOUTH WHITTIER (3,300)

Budget: $16.3 million

$ Amount Cut: $650,000

Layoffs: 0

Program Cuts: Increased class size to legal limits; reduced custodial hours; eliminated instructional aides from summer school.

District (Enrollment): WHITTIER CITY (6,200)

Budget: $22.5 million