Parents Put Protests Over Funding to Paper

Moms and dads are mobilizing, armed with computers, cellphones and a cause: the governor’s proposed changes to education funding.

South Orange County parents recently deluged the governor’s office with thousands of hot-pink letters. San Gabriel Valley parents and grandparents late last month wrote their own protest missives. In Torrance, a parents group that lobbies for smaller classes engineered a write-your-lawmakers campaign.

These efforts probably are trendsetters for other parents because the California State PTA intends to ship nearly 4,000 “grass-roots advocacy” packets to its chapters around the state. The PTA said that, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled his budget, members clogged its phone lines and inboxes with one question: What can we do?

What incensed education groups was Schwarzenegger’s recent proposal to reduce the school funding that Proposition 98 requires. The law, which voters approved in 1988, set up a funding formula that provides schools with at least 40% of the state budget each year and increases education spending with state revenue.

Schwarzenegger and education groups agreed last year to suspend the proposition if the $2.2 billion it required was restored in this year’s budget. Instead, the governor said last month that he would withhold Proposition 98 funding and ask voters to amend the law.

“People feel betrayed,” said state PTA legislative director Cecelia Mansfield. “They’re disappointed the governor did not keep his word to make education a priority.”

Though Schwarzenegger’s proposal would give schools more money during 2005-06 than they received last year, educators say California districts still are underfunded. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the state, plans to cut $168 million from its budget even though school board members say they still expect to increase teachers’ pay.

The governor acknowledges that it is a tough fiscal year, but he says all levels of government must share in belt tightening.

“There will be groups who believe education should have received more,” said H.D. Palmer, a California Department of Finance spokesman. “But because of the fiscal crisis we inherited, we still have to live within our means.”

Palmer said the governor had to trim from education to avoid curtailing, for example, spending for children’s health insurance.

Still, soccer moms and dads are riled.

The Capistrano Unified Council of PTSA flooded the Capitol with hot-pink papers, an approach recycled from November, when it sent about 6,000 coral postcards to 35 federal legislators debating special education funding.

The next month, troubled by rumblings about the state budget, council President Julie Redmond and her legislative team distributed equally bright form letters to parents. They shipped to Sacramento 2,000 missives on neon-pink paper asking Schwarzenegger to restore Proposition 98. The color choice was intentional: No one could miss it. “It was either that or neon green,” Redmond said.

Each month, the council intends to dispatch a handful of members to lobby at the Capitol.

“We need to be in their face,” said Redmond, a Mission Viejo mother of a seventh-grade boy. “This is not some administrator doing a ‘Poor me, we don’t have money, blah blah’ thing.”

If they listen to parents vent, she added, legislators might realize that “just because the state’s a mess, it’s not our children’s fault.”

Likewise, about 60 people in the San Gabriel Valley’s PTA district whipped out their association stationery from folders in a church meeting room last week. They spent 20 minutes of their winter conference writing anecdotes about how the cuts would affect them. PTA members plans to deliver them to Schwarzenegger’s office this month.

“Personally, I want to tell him he broke his promise, and the kids of California were counting on him,” said Doris Blum, the district’s legislative chairwoman and a Glendora Unified School District board member.

The state PTA, meanwhile, is mailing how-to-advocate kits, which include fact sheets and sample letters, to newspapers and legislators -- both short-form (a paragraph) and long (a page). Several Southland district officials said they expected a flood of parent-to-Capitol correspondence after the state PTA gives guidance to its 1 million members.

The PTA also recently allied itself with Supportmusic.com, an online resource that steers music-program advocates to experts and lobbying tips to build on its own support-the-arts efforts. The website, with as many as 6,000 hits a month, serves as a clearinghouse for music education research.

Another group, the California School Boards Assn., is prodding members to sign “pink slips” that say the budget proposal leaves them “deeply troubled.”

Bruce Fuller, who studies education and public policy at UC Berkeley, said the quasi-grass-roots strategy could pay off. The impact of parents telling legislators about broken windows and teacher layoffs at their schools, for example, could be effective.

“The more vivid, the more human scale, the more legislators will perk up and say, ‘This is serious. This isn’t a legislative discussion in Sacramento,’ ” he said.

One risk, however, is that foot soldiers could spread faulty information and reduce their credibility.

“If you’re unleashing thousands of parents, they need to have their facts straight,” Fuller said. And, though letters and phone calls help a cause, the most mind-changing conversations are face-to-face with a spectrum of parents.

“This is no longer simply cutting school funds in East L.A. or South-Central,” he said. “This is Altadena or the well-heeled Westside. This is a middle-class issue that could come to haunt the governor.”

In Torrance, parents banded together last year to maintain class sizes in kindergarten and third grade. About 600 people marched at one school board meeting, blasting an air horn, waving signs and chanting, “Just say no to classroom crowding!”

Emboldened by its victory, the Torrance Parents Organization is facing off with the governor. It has scheduled four meetings in which attendees will view the PBS documentary “First to Worst,” which tracks declines in the California school system, and then put pen to paper.

Organization President Steve Hemingway, who has two children in elementary school, said members aren’t “rabble-rousers,” just frustrated mothers, father and guardians. About 50 of the group’s members plan to fly to Sacramento this month to request a meeting with Schwarzenegger -- some equipped with signs from last spring’s march.

Recently, the group’s website read: “Imagine the K-3 class DOUBLED and up to 40+ students in middle school and high school classrooms. This is NOT what our kids deserve!”