School Workers Criticize Board’s Spending Plan

In a rare liaison, principals and teachers joined forces Monday to criticize the Los Angeles Unified School District’s planned distribution of nearly $30 million in additional funding. They were accompanied by school police, secretaries, teachers’ aides and janitors.

In fact, representatives for all 60,000 school district employees, whose salaries were restored to 1991 levels just last year, maintain some of the new money should be spent on raises. The district has other plans--ranging from the benign (more music instruction) to the controversial (added administrators).

“Many of us are angry at the district’s Stone Age policy that it’s OK for the district’s employees to share the pain, but not the gain,� said Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

“When I start siding with UTLA, you know you’re in trouble,� said Det. Ray Boulden, president of the School Police Officers Organization.

The school board, which has been inundated with calls on the subject in recent days, indefinitely postponed its vote on the majority of the expenditure and delayed a vote on the remainder--about $8 million in state block grant money--until Monday.

A particular flash point is a proposal to spend $3.7 million adding staff to 27 regional offices, which critics say is merely rebuilding the regional superintendents’ system dismantled four years ago as part of administrative downsizing.

“It is symbolic of having their priorities upside-down,� Higuchi said. “The first thing they should have done was take care of their employees’ basic needs.�

Supt. Sid Thompson has portrayed beefing up the 27 “cluster� offices as crucial to reforms, which rely on shifting power from the central administration building downtown to individual schools and then scrutinizing the results.

“We just have to decide, are we serious about decentralizing?� said board member Mark Slavkin. “It’s unfair to say everything that’s not at the school is . . . bad, but when there’s a problem at a school, we want an immediate response.�

Several board members attacked the union representatives for failing to acknowledge that the district is making headway in closed-door negotiations.

Areas that Slavkin and others portrayed as nearly settled include: a possible raise or bonus; reducing all class sizes slightly, and not dipping into a health benefit reserve fund to pay the $10-million cost of providing benefits for the 3,000 new teachers hired this year, most of them to handle classes added through shrinking first- and second grades.

Each percentage-point raise for all employees costs an estimated $20 million.

Outside the board room, Higuchi said he remains hopeful that the district will come through with a small raise, but “we’ve been having meetings with them since July and we’re basically talking about the same thing today that we talked about in July.�