BOARD ORDERS GRADE 3 SHRUNK; KINDERGARTEN PLAN ASSAILED.

Byline: Terri Hardy Daily News Staff Writer

The Los Angeles Board of Education supported plans Monday night to reduce class sizes to 20 students in the third grade, but bogged down in a furious debate over how to shrink kindergarten classes.

An original district plan to allow schools to claim they had reduced their kindergarten classes - and receive extra state money - by team-teaching large numbers of students - drew angry reactions from instructors and arguing among the board members.

Kindergarten teachers said the team-teaching plan would cut down their planning time and instruction would suffer.

``You're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by calling this class-size reduction,'' said Genal Weber, a kindergarten teacher at Los Angeles Elementary School.

The board unanimously voted to give the go-ahead for the Los Angeles Unified School District to begin plans to cut class size in the third grade.

After a long discussion, though, board members agreed to wait a week to decide whether schools should have the option of shrinking kindergarten classes to 20 students if they had space, or make team teaching their only option.

Some Board of Education members argued that the decision on class size in kindergarten should be a matter for individual schools to decide, while other board members said there should be a uniform policy throughout the district so all schools are treated equitably.

``Nobody knows better how to fix the education needs than the local educators,'' said board member David Tokofsky. ``I thought every school was going to decide how to best help their schools. Let the teachers decide. Let the schools decide,'' said board member George Kiriyama to enthusiastic cheers from teachers.

Kiriyama represents the harbor area, where several uncrowded schools could shrink classes to 20 students.

But board member Vickie Castro, who represents a crowded east-side district, said it was not a local decision and there needed to be ``equity in implementation.''

``It (20-student kindergarten classrooms) can't be implemented for all students in the district'' because some schools did not have the space, Castro said. And board member Jeff Horton said reducing kindergarten classes to 20 students would ``draw teachers away from third grade.''

Horton told the board members that they should be honest and admit that reducing some classes to 20 would unfairly benefit uncrowded areas such as Pacific Palisades and the west San Fernando Valley and hurt inner-city schools.

Tokofsky shot back that he was ``very tired with the stale rhetoric saying equity, equity, equity.''

He said the district had strong safeguards to protect equity, and that it also had to be concerned with ``choice and freedom.''

An unprecedented population boom coming on top of the wildly popular class-size reduction has led to a classroom space crisis in the LAUSD, said Gordon Wohlers, assistant superintendent for school reform.

Wohlers said allowing kindergartens to shrink to 20 students wasn't feasible because of the lack of classroom space, the number of teachers that would be needed, lack of money and concerns of equity.

As it is, schools will have difficulty reducing grade 3 to 20 students, Wohlers said.

``Only 113 schools in the over 400 schools could do it,'' Wohlers said.

Wohlers said reducing kindergarten to 20 students would tax the district so heavily that an increased number of students would need to be bused.

Under the team-teaching reduction, there would be a morning and afternoon kindergarten class - with anywhere from 29 to 33 students in each session. The morning instructor would be required to spend 100 minutes in the afternoon class, and vice versa, to qualify for the state money.

Kindergarten teachers said the plan would lead to chaos and confusion, not the intended increased student achievement.

``This will not solve the crisis of the body count in our schools,'' said Mary Whiteley, a kindergarten teacher at Strathern Street Elementary School.

``You're still going to have 32 kids competing for the teacher's attention,'' said Ana Maria Garcia, a teacher at Stanford Elementary School. ``There will be less prep time, less materials.''

The state has only approved class-size reduction in first, second and another grade level - either grade K or 3. It is anticipated that the state will agree to fund lower class sizes in all four grades when it approves its already overdue budget.