EDITORIAL STUFFED CHICKENS LAUSD JUNKETS POINT TO OUT-OF-CONTROL BUREAUCRACY.

IT'S outrageous, but not surprising, that the financially strapped Los Angeles Unified School District spends $16 million a year on fancy travel, rental cars and accommodations for training and seminars it could just as easily host at its own facilities.

This is, after all, the LAUSD.

And if there's one thing the behemoth bureaucracy does well, it's take care of its own. For whatever successes Superintendent Roy Romer has achieved in the areas of school construction and test scores, he's been less than successful in reining in the district's bureaucracy.

The LAUSD has slashed classroom spending by $38 million, while letting the junkets go untouched. As longtime school board member David Tokofsky put it, ``While teachers were struggling to get chalk, they were eating stuffed chicken in air-conditioned hotels.''

And how.

Fine hotels are the norm. The Wilshire Grand is a district mainstay, hosting LAUSD events almost every week - never mind that the district's $74.7 million headquarters has its own, amply furnished, high-tech meeting facilities.

And if that won't do, there are 100 other meeting sites in the district's vast real-estate holdings. Then there are the hundreds of LAUSD campuses, with their classrooms, gymnasiums and other amenities.

But for decades, in a culture that seldom gives much thought to economy or efficiency, standard operating procedure has been to hold such events off-site, no expense spared.

Even Don Mullinax, usually the district's fiscal hawk, has been among the junketeers. His office spent $5,200 last month to rent space for three days at the Omni Los Angeles and California Plaza Hotel to train 30 staff members on how to conduct performance audits.

Too bad no one was offering a workshop on cost-cutting.

It took the district's new chief operating officer, Tim Buresh, to tally the extent of the waste, although discovering it was surely no problem. Everyone knew, it's just that no one objected.

Until now.

District officials have scrambled to offer public assurances that the days of junkets are over. They say they regret their excesses, they're sorry and they're ready to move on.

Let's hope they're right.

Because far worse than the occasional stuffed chicken is a district bureaucracy that's fiscally reckless.