Group Calls for ‘Sin Tax’ to Aid Schools : Education: LEARN will try to get initiative on next November’s ballot. It would raise tobacco and alcohol levies to reduce class size and add computers.

Los Angeles’ largest school reform group has launched a drive to place an initiative on the November, 1996, ballot that would increase tobacco and alcohol taxes to fund school reform measures, including reducing class size and upgrading computers.

The constitutional amendment would assess taxes of 50 cents on a pack of cigarettes and a dime per drink--defined as a beer, a glass of wine or a shot of liquor--and raise up to $2.4 billion annually.

“I don’t think anybody likes the idea of any kind of tax, but at the end of the day we have to make decisions about investments for all of us,” said Mike Roos, the initiative’s sponsor and president of LEARN, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now.

The initiative was submitted to the state attorney general’s office for review Thursday. If its language is approved, supporters will have until April to collect the 770,000 signatures to qualify it for next November’s ballot.

The initiative is an end-run around the Legislature, which has turned down proposals to tax alcohol and tobacco.

Ballot box approval will hinge in part on whether voters can distinguish between this measure and school building bonds, which have fallen from electoral favor. Roos said the initiative’s promise to put money into reforms instead of buildings will make the difference.

In a telephone poll this month, 67% of those contacted said they would vote for a tax to fund school reforms, said Newport Beach consultant Stu Mollrich, whose company has been hired to run the initiative campaign.

Mollrich and his partner, Arnold Forde, are veteran political consultants who have coordinated numerous successful anti-tax campaigns. But they also worked on the campaign to establish Roos’ group, LEARN, a nonprofit coalition of education, political and business leaders that was formed four years ago to find ways to boost student achievement in Los Angeles Unified.

In this campaign, Forde & Mollrich will face formidable opponents, including two of the best-heeled interest groups in the state: the liquor and tobacco industries. Tobacco companies poured $18 million into a failed initiative last year that would have loosened California’s anti-smoking laws.

Political consultant Lee Stitzenberger, who ran the tobacco industry’s campaign, called the new proposal “simply an excise tax, typically imposed on people least to be able to afford it.”

To qualify for the ballot, Roos would have to raise an estimated $1 million, plus millions more to run the campaign. But he declined to identify his major backers.

If approved by voters, 40% of the “sin tax” revenues--perhaps as much as $1 billion--would be used to hire enough new teachers to cut class size in kindergarten through third grade from 30 students, the current statewide average, to 22. That portion of the tax would also be used to establish alternative high schools where violent or disruptive students could be sent.

Another 40% would be earmarked for technology, to purchase computers and other equipment, and train teachers and aides to use them.

In addition, smaller pots of money would be set aside to freeze student fees at state universities and colleges and improve campus safety.