Principal Injured by Protester at Campus : Schools: She suffers a head cut when hit by an object thrown from a crowd of students demonstrating over budget cuts.

The student protest movement over cutbacks in Los Angeles schools took an ugly turn Thursday when a high school principal suffered a head injury from an object thrown from a crowd of students rushing off the campus.

The incident at George Washington Preparatory High School near Inglewood was the latest in a string of otherwise generally peaceful demonstrations that have spread across the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District in the last week.

It came on the same day as the release of a state fact-finding report that supported the district’s portrayal of the state of its finances as dismal.

Margarite LaMotte, principal of George Washington High, received four stitches for a head wound at a local hospital and then was released, officials said. No other injuries and no arrests were reported in the walkout involving 200 to 300 students, sheriff’s deputies said.

Just after lunch, a crowd of students chanting slogans against pending teacher pay cuts walked out of the school at 10800 Denker Ave. The students climbed over locked gates on the 110th Street side, said Josephine Jimenez, an administrator in the district’s senior high school division. LaMotte and other school leaders went outside to talk to the young people and make sure they were safe, Jimenez said.

“In the process, something was thrown. We don’t know what. Whatever the object was, it hit the principal on the head and caused a break in the skin and quite a lot of bleeding,” Jimenez said. A sheriff’s deputy conjectured that a rock was thrown.

Sheriff’s deputies and school police helped disperse the crowd, and extra security is planned for today, according to a school district spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, a state-appointed fact-finding panel released a report that said massive pay cuts proposed for district employees are “appropriate and inevitable.” “This panel finds the district’s basic approach is fair, reasonable, and necessary in order to avoid insolvency . . .” the report read. “We recommend that parties proceed along the lines of the district’s proposed reductions in compensation.”

The state Public Employment Relations Board appointed the three-member panel after negotiations between the district and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles reached an impasse. The district’s employees are being asked to take pay cuts this year of 6% to 16.5%.

The report also said large raises given to workers in the past--and the lack of new income to help pay them--contributed to the district’s budgetary turmoil.

“It is the chairman’s considered opinion that past salary actions, quite favorable to district employees, lie close to the heart of the district’s present financial crisis and threatened insolvency,” the report read. “. . . It is therefore entirely appropriate and inevitable, painful though it will be, that the current salary levels be adjusted.”

In other developments, the State Board of Education on Thursday granted the district permission to eliminate holiday pay for its classified employees, officials said. The action was supported by several employee unions whose members would prefer losing some paid holidays to reductions in base pay.

Also, Deputy Supt. Sid Thompson sent a letter to the president of United Teachers-Los Angeles on Wednesday, asking its representatives to encourage students to stage their protests on campus, during lunch or break periods, but not during classes.

“I am deeply concerned that our students are at risk with their involvement in this process,” Thompson wrote, referring to the recent walkouts at more than a dozen schools. UTLA President Helen Bernstein echoed Thompson’s concerns, about student safety, but said the union and its members have never encouraged teen-agers to vent their outrage by skipping classes and leaving campus.