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08/13/2004:
"California Will Spend More to Help Its Poorest Schools"
NY TimesLOS ANGELES, Aug. 12 - If 16-year-old Eliezer Williams has his way, rats will no longer scurry through classrooms in California, and every student will have books, a place to sit and a clean bathroom to use.
Eliezer is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 1.5 million California students, most from poor neighborhoods.
The lawsuit accused the state of denying poor children adequate textbooks, trained teachers and safe classrooms.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, plans to announce Friday that California has settled the suit by agreeing to the demands that the students receive equal access to basic instructional materials in all core subjects and that they be taught by qualified teachers in sound and healthy schools.
The proposed settlement, which is subject to approval by a judge, would require the state to devote as much as $1 billion to repairs and upgrades to 2,400 deteriorating, low-performing schools.
It would also provide almost $139 million for textbooks this year alone.
"This means that every child counts," said Mark D. Rosenbaum, legal director of the Southern California branch of the A.C.L.U.
The deal, Mr. Rosenbaum said, ends "decades of neglect and indifference."
"We were in classrooms where kids had to share space with rats," he said. "We saw essays posted on a board in an elementary school where kids had written about the prevalence of rats in their classrooms."
While touring schools to research the lawsuit, Mr. Rosenbaum said, he found children who had defecated in class because restrooms were out of order.
In some classrooms, he said, rain poured through holes in ceilings.
Citing a Harris poll, Mr. Rosenbaum said that one million to two million students did not have books for use in school or to take home for study, and that schools with high concentrations of black and Latino students were 74 percent more likely than predominantly white schools to lack sufficient textbooks.
...The administration of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who was ousted last year in a recall election, spent about $18 million fighting the lawsuit.
Lawyers for the state argued that poor students were unlikely to do better in school even if they had the same educational benefits as children who were not poor. They also said the responsibility for ensuring educational equality belonged to local governments.
But the plaintiffs argued that the state had denied thousands of children their fundamental right to an education under the California Constitution. full article
