CA: State settles lawsuit over dilapidated schools

Mercury News ^ | 8/20/04 | Kate Folmar

[NormsRevenge]

SACRAMENTO - The state could spend several hundred million dollars or more to buy new textbooks and repair dilapidated urban schools under a tentative out-of-court settlement to a long-running class-action lawsuit aimed at unequal educational opportunities endured by many poor and minority students.

The agreement would give sweeping new powers to parents and county superintendents of education to ensure that hundreds of thousands of students in 2,400 schools statewide learn from current textbooks and in decent classrooms. Schools scoring in the lowest three rungs of the state's Academic Performance Index -- including several in San Jose, East Palo Alto, San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond -- would be affected.

The agreement offers relatively little money upfront -- $188 million for new classroom materials and some maintenance -- with the promise that the state will later reimburse schools for fixing the most critical facilities problems, such as faulty wiring, clogged bathrooms and broken locks. Estimates are that making those repairs will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to more than $1 billion over several years, to be paid from unspent money allotted under California's constitutional guarantee of minimum school funding.

The administration of ousted Gov. Gray Davis spent years and close to $20 million in public money fighting the lawsuit, contending that local school districts, not the state, were responsible for ensuring decent schools. It also filed a counter-suit against the districts with schools named in the lawsuit, known as Williams vs. State of California. Those counter-suits will be dropped as part of the settlement.

[dasboot]

Poor teachers. I bet their homes are really tawdry, too. (offsarc)