THE STATE BUDGET : Almost Everyone Will Feel the Pain : Services: The disabled, the poor and middle-class parents sending children to public schools are among those who whose lives will be affected by fiscal retrenching.

By AMY PYLE

Sept. 4, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In her most pessimistic moods, Bonnie Hagy worries that the state budget cuts could be her death sentence. In the sunniest moments, she knows they could signal an end to independent living.

For Hagy, who was left quadriplegic and dependent on a respirator by polio in 1953, state-financed 24-hour home care is the life preserver that keeps her out of a hospital or rest home. Being cared for less than full time is not an option for Hagy. So with the state’s decision to reduce home care grants by 12%, she will have to cut her caretaker’s pay from $1,100 to $968 a month.

Retention of live-in workers already is difficult--the hours are long and the situation is confining. Hagy believes a pay cut could mean no one would take the job.

“Even now, sometimes somebody will work for a week or two, sometimes two weekends--they get the paycheck and they’re gone,” said Hagy, 50. “Sometimes they stay six months. It’s very difficult.”

The state budget accord ripped more than $1 billion out of local governments, including at least $586 million out of an already strapped Los Angeles County treasury, $400 million from the Los Angeles Unified School District and $73 million from the city of Los Angeles.

Those reductions will mean a dramatic downsizing of services for everyone who depends on government in some way--the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy.

Among them is Hagy, one of 64,500 elderly, blind and disabled who depend on a state-funded program coordinated by the county. Also among those affected are a homeless welfare mother and a middle-class couple who find their basic belief in tax-supported public schools challenged.

Hagy puzzles at the wisdom of it all because the cuts may actually trigger a greater drain on government funds. In her case, alternatives to round-the-clock home care are more expensive--putting her in a hospital would cost the state up to $1,200 a day and rest homes tend to charge at least $65 a day.

“I really do understand the problem that the state’s in. . . . They just can’t continue to pay for everybody,” she said. “But they need to look at the whole situation and see what needs to be cut and what doesn’t. Sometimes they forget to look at people and just look at paper.”

But independence, not money, is the critical issue for Hagy, who has lived with her disabled husband in a rented Monrovia house for more than 13 years. They cannot work, cook or clean for themselves and both breathe through respirators most of the time, but they take pleasure in what others might consider mundane activities.

“We try and function like every other person in the community does,” she said. “We’re active in church, we go to the store, we don’t have to live under the dictates of a nurse. . . . Maybe the average person doesn’t think about the importance of things like that.”

And then there is that nagging fear. Several of Hagy’s friends have landed in nursing homes and none have ever come home.

“One of them committed suicide, the others died,” she said. “To me, that would be the end of my life.”

Yvette Holden has been watching life as she knew it unravel for nearly a year. Now she fears that the 4.5% reduction in state welfare grants will dash her first real chance to pull it back together again.

Home for Holden, 27, and her 4-year-old son is a homeless shelter: the Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro. With the shelter staff’s assistance, Holden is trying to save enough money from her monthly welfare check to pay a rental deposit.

But that isn’t easy on $535 a month. The prospect of at least a $24 monthly cutback--and additional cuts being negotiated with the federal government--limits her apartment choices significantly.

“If you find an apartment for that, already you’re lucky,” she said. “It costs the whole $535 and then there’s no shoes, no underclothes, no nothing. . . . And my son eats way past the food stamp amount.”

Holden lost her job as a rental car reservations agent in November when her company moved to Oklahoma. Then she lost her apartment because she could no longer afford her $650 monthly rent.

“Everything started going downward,” she said.

She and her son bounced from friend to relative for several months. When they started to wear out their welcome, Holden began begging people to give her son a place to sleep, then “hanging out” herself all night, sometimes with other homeless people.

When she applied for jobs she found that there were dozens of others in line ahead of her and that the wages were inadequate to support two people. She had been used to earning $7 an hour plus commissions at her previous job.

“I’ve tried and tried and there’s really no jobs out there,” she said.

Three months ago, she applied for Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the most common form of state welfare grant. But she still found it impossible to save enough money for a rental deposit while living with friends and on the streets.

The shelter, which she learned about through other homeless people, represented the first glimmer of hope. But she is only allowed to remain there for two months.

She is afraid her son will suffer the most if the state budget cuts leave her homeless again.

“It’s hard on him even though I don’t know if he really understands,” she said. “He knows we don’t have a place to go.”

For Joelle Keen, the recession-ravaged budget does not threaten to take her home or her life, but it does threaten her most basic values.

Keen, 39, is the mother of three young children, the oldest of whom just started first grade at Mar Vista Elementary School. All her friends send their children to private schools but Keen has resisted because of her strong belief in public eduction.

“I think that there’s a lot of snobbery and a lot of fear about public schools and I just don’t share it,” she said. “The public schools have very dedicated, well-trained teachers and what can be gained by sending your kids into something that represents the real world cannot be duplicated.”

Faced with the possibility of deep cuts in education financing, Keen, on the eve of her daughter’s first day of school, began to think what to her was the unthinkable: private schools.

“I decided I was going to look into it for next year, in tears,” she said.

Ultimately, the school cuts proved to be slightly softer than anticipated--perhaps not much more than the $400 million already gouged from the Los Angeles Unified School District budget earlier this year--and Keen delayed taking that step.

But she views the budget fight as a strong indication that schools have lost their political clout and are likely to face more serious problems in the years to come.

For now, Mar Vista is one of the lucky schools. Most of the parents are solidly middle class, willing and able to supplement the system with money, as well as volunteer labor and enthusiasm.

“In a way we are insulated” from the harsh impact of many of the budget cuts, Keen acknowledged. “If they run out of crayons, Mar Vista’s not going to go without crayons.”

When it was announced a few days ago that school gardening services had been eliminated, a parent volunteered to mow the grass and the Girl Scouts agreed to tend the flowers. A parent organization--called the Mar Vista Enrichment Group--has raised money from a variety of sources to pay for teachers in music and computer classes. The group also helps support front-office clerical staff, which frees school money for teacher aides.

Keen said she and her husband, David, probably will donate about $400 in cash to the school this year and countless hours of their time.

Even that high level of financial and emotional involvement cannot overcome obstacles such as growing class size and shrinking teacher paychecks. The group takes flowers to teachers on the first day of school, sponsors a breakfast once a month and furnishes items from teacher “wish lists,” but as the fiscal situation deteriorates, Keen knows that will not be enough.

“We really can’t do much about teacher morale when they’re taking it in the gut--not the chin, the gut, “ she said. “I keep thinking, ‘What would it take to make me give up on public school?’ Would the class size have to go up to 40? Would the administrators have to come out from downtown to substitute . . . which would just be baby-sitting? I don’t know. . . . I don’t want to think about it.”