EDITORIAL ONE FAT SNAKE UNDER ROMER, LAUSD BUREAUCRACY HAS SWELLED.

TRYING to justify the expansion of the LAUSD's bureaucracy under his watch, Roy Romer got downright folksy. ``This is an egg going through a snake,'' the outgoing superintendent said. ``It's going to pass.''

What Romer meant, we think, is that some of the 680 new bureaucrats at the Los Angeles Unified School District are temporary. Headquarters just needed some more bodies to oversee his mammoth school-building program.

But someday the program will end, and the swollen bureaucracy will, like the swollen belly of an egg-eating snake, return to its normal size.

Maybe, but we're not so sure that the future of the LAUSD will be so different from its past. Romer's logic rests on some flawed assumptions.

The first is that the pre-Romer size of the district bureaucracy was healthy -- that if and when the new bureaucrats leave, the LAUSD's noneducational contingent will more or less be the right size.

But even before Romer arrived, LAUSD officialdom was too large, too meddlesome, too unaccountable and too unresponsive. It's a problem Romer should have fixed, but chose to ignore, so it's only grown worse. Since 2001, the number of administrators has soared, even as the numbers of students and teachers have declined.

Romer's other dubious assumption is that someone in the future will be more interested in shrinking the bureaucracy than he was. It's a nice thought, but if the bureaucracy has proved itself to be one thing over the last few decades, it's resilient. In the public sector, a job is for life, and old positions never disappear.

Romer ought to know that better than anyone, yet he acts as though he doesn't. Which is why new Superintendent David Brewer III and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be stuck with the unenviable job of cleaning up after his beloved snake -- and putting it on a diet.