Wednesday, May 29, 2002 in Los Angeles Daily News
By Michael Warder
THE $23.6 billion California budget squeeze provides an opportunity for foundations, corporations, individuals and families to step up and make a big difference in the education of thousands of children from low-income families.
Consider the current condition of California’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified. With 736,000 students, Superintendent Roy Romer recently stated that the district is now overcrowded by 180,000 students. It is only going to get worse. The LAUSD wants to build 85 schools by 2007. Hercules would be challenged to perform such a feat, even if he had the money, but the LAUSD does not even have the money.
With construction costs at $35,000 per student, or maybe $60,000 per student if your estimates of construction costs are less rosy, the cost to build these schools would be somewhere between $6 billion and $11 billion.
In addition, the LAUSD needs to recruit thousands of new teachers to lead an increasing number of students in the face of teachers quitting or retiring. Yet this coming year, the LAUSD is forced to cut the current budget by about $500 million.
To spread out the cost of building schools in school districts throughout California, the state Senate has passed authorization for a $25 billion bond, the largest in state history. How that effort will fare remains to be seen.
To round out the financial picture, the leader of the teachers union of Los Angeles, representing 48,000 members, is “promising” to hold the education bureaucrats responsible for an increase in salaries for its members. That is a barely veiled threat to strike.
In the meantime, the Los Angeles public schools in particular, and California schools in general, are ranked among the very worst in the country. Similar stories of woe abound throughout the state, but Los Angeles, in terms of sheer scale, has perhaps the biggest mountain to climb.
In this context, the Los Angeles Children’s Scholarship Fund is an important safety valve. With more philanthropic support, it could relieve more of the overcrowding.
Currently, the LACSF provides partial tuition scholarships to 2,910 students that attend more than 400 private schools in Los Angeles and to 700 more children beyond Los Angeles.
The LACSF estimates that there are now about 12,000-14,000 empty desks in the private schools of Los Angeles. For approximately $16 million to $19 million, including the cost to administer the program, it could fill up those seats for one year.
When the LACSF scholarships were offered in Los Angeles in 1999, the parents of more than 50,000 children applied. Demand exceeded the resources on hand, so potential recipients were chosen by lottery.
In this program families are considered “low-income” basically if they qualify for the federal lunch program. The scholarships are 25 percent, 50 percent or 75 percent of tuition based on a sliding scale that takes into account household income and the number of people who live in a household.
Parents choose the school their children attend, but each family pays a minimum of $500. Scholarships for the coming school year are capped at $1,850 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $3,000 for ninth through 12th grades, and the average scholarship is about $1,200.
The average household income of participants is about $21,500. A Harvard University study by professor Paul Peterson shows that parents love this type of program.
It is too early to reach definitive conclusions about academic achievement, except one. African-American students test significantly higher after participating in the program for three years. Schools in the Los Angeles program include Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and secular. If there were more financial support and if classrooms began to fill, likely more schools would be built.
Educating a child in the public schools of California costs the state about $9,000 per average daily attendance in K-12, excluding capital outlay and debt service for construction costs. Since the average scholarship is about $1,200, the LACSF program could save the state money.
This program reduces the need for busing children from overcrowded schools to those less crowded. Some of these trips take two hours one way. In those instances, parents can rarely, if ever, visit their child’s school. The program also sends dollars for education into some areas of the city that could use the economic stimulus.
Furthermore, the Children’s Scholarship Fund will match donations dollar for dollar to extend scholarships for children already in the program. For new children, there are other matching opportunities. Most important, the program gives parents and children educational options in a time of severe budget restraints, and with those options come hope for a better life.
With more support, the LACSF could alleviate now at least some of the overcrowding.
EDITOR-NOTE:
Michael Warder is executive director of the Los Angeles Children’s Scholarship Fund. Visit the fund’s Web site at www.lacsf.org.