EDITORIAL BIGGER AND BIGGER THE INCREDIBLE GROWING LAUSD BUREAUCRACY.

LAST summer, when the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education voted to move the district's headquarters into a 29-story downtown skyscraper, member David Tokofsky was the lone holdout.

Tokofsky was suspicious of the project's $157.9 million price tag, as well as of the building's mammoth size, which was much bigger than what LAUSD officials estimated they needed. In words that now sound prescient, Tokofsky warned, ``This will give the bureaucracy plenty of room to grow.''

Little did he know just how fast the incredible expanding bureaucracy would swell. Under the leadership of Superintendent Roy Romer, the district's central office administrative payroll has grown by 533 since December 2000, up to a whopping 3,902.

With the first stages of the LAUSD's move only a month away, officials now worry that their staff is too large for the space that will be immediately available. They estimate that until the rest of the Beaudry Avenue building is ready in 2006, they'll need to rent other office space just to accommodate the overflow personnel - at the cost of an additional $3 million to $4 million a year.

Count the new headquarters as one of a long list of LAUSD projects that will come in over budget, much like the Belmont Learning Center or any number of expenses associated with Proposition BB. Last summer, when the school board approved the purchase of the new building, its members assured the public that the $157.9 million price tag would be final.

But it hasn't turned out that way, and now the district, which is facing a massive deficit and major cuts in school spending, will need to come up with as much as $4 million more just to accommodate its burgeoning bureaucracy.

That's on top of the price of paying the new bureaucrats. Some, such as the 57 extra lawyers working in the LAUSD's General Counsel's Office, make between $125,000 and $155,000 a year, plus ample benefits, of course. Maybe some of that cost will be offset by using fewer outside lawyers and, well, maybe not.

All told, the cost of the newest layer of bureaucracy will probably total in the tens of millions each year. And that money, like the cost of the new headquarters, will ultimately come out of funds that otherwise could go to directly help teach kids.

While district officials scrimp and save on classroom supplies, textbooks and instruction, they somehow have little trouble coming up with funds to support their out-of-control bureaucracy.

Gordon Wohlers, the LAUSD's chief of staff, insists that the bureaucracy won't come at the expense of education. ``The ratio of expenditures in the schools to nonschool expenditures has remained the same,'' he says.

That might be true, but it shows clearly that the LAUSD does not deliver on its promise of economy of scale. And it faces a $54 million budget shortfall this year, and more in the year ahead. To balance the books, it will need to make cuts, and it's unlikely the 533 new bureaucrats will end up paying the price.

The history of the LAUSD for the past 30 years is one of a bureaucracy that continually finds ways to get fatter and fatter. Promises of downsizing, such as the 800 or so jobs to be saved with the minidistrict scheme of two years ago, never seem to deliver.

Once again, the LAUSD bureaucrats have tended to their own needs first.

The bureaucracy keeps getting bigger, but is the education getting substantially better?