Host of Problems Often Displace Learning in Poverty-Plagued Schools : Education: In areas of hunger, violence and neglect, just getting children to class is a victory. Once there, they may find woeful facilities.

For six months, Shirley Carter started work the same way--with a phone call to a fourth-grader in a poor San Diego neighborhood to make sure he got to school.

She would let the phone ring until he woke up and answered. Then he would get himself dressed and trudge off to school, his mother never awaking from the previous night’s drinking.

“One morning something came up and I couldn’t call,” said Carter, a truant officer whose job and obsession is to keep troubled kids in school. “But he had gotten so used to me calling him, he got up anyway and came on in.”

In neighborhoods seared by poverty, violence and neglect, just getting children to school is a victory.

But once at school, these children are put at a further disadvantage by a system that produces an impoverished learning environment that matches the poor conditions at home.

Since school districts are financed primarily at the local level with property taxes, spending on schools can vary greatly. Affluent districts with large tax bases have ample money. Poor districts do not.

Spending can vary even within the same district.

But the disparity in finances is not the only adversity that these children must overcome. Valuable teaching time must be spent addressing needs more basic than an education: decent meals, clean clothes, a pair of shoes, a responsible adult.

Widening the gap even further is the inability of parents to pay for extras--like air conditioning--from their own pockets, the high cost of transporting kids in poor rural districts and the lingering effects of violence in and around the schools.

Visits to schools in rich and poor communities in California and Virginia provide graphic, painful evidence of what the disparities can mean.

As a third-grader at Halifax Elementary School in Virginia, Charles Sands liked to draw Ninja Turtles but only got art instruction once every three weeks from an itinerant teacher who made the rounds of several schools.

If Charles had attended school across the state in affluent Fairfax County, he might have been taught by a professional artist.

Economic disparities have fueled lawsuits in at least 20 states, charging fundamental unfairness in educational opportunity because of the way school districts are financed. Others already have dealt with the problem.

Some experts suggest shifting away from local property taxes to broader sources such as state income taxes, or a more equal state redistribution of local property taxes.

In a landmark 1971 decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s system for financing schools denied equal protection to children living in property-poor school districts.

Other states were energized to take action.

School finance systems in Kentucky, Montana, Texas and New Jersey have since been ruled unconstitutional. Each state was ordered to equalize spending between affluent and poor districts.

Even so, the national education policy that is evolving in Washington--with its new goals and push for national standards--tends to overlook the disparities that make school districts inherently unable to be equal. In the federal government’s deficit-dominated atmosphere, money or increased federal aid to close the gap are seldom mentioned.

“Nationally, the view is everyone should be educated,” said Richard G. Salmon, a Virginia Tech professor who is an expert on public school finances. “President Bush implies all education should be high quality, but when you look at different states, you see education is not equal. In fact, it’s not anywhere near equal within the states.”

Consider:

Students in rural Charlotte County, Va., pay as much as $40 a year to rent textbooks. Rooms in their schools are sometimes flooded by thunderstorms. Libraries have been sliced up to make classrooms.

Many of the rural Southside Virginia schools do not employ nurses.

Across the state and a giant economic divide, students in Fairfax County attend classes in schools with free textbooks and, in many cases, gyms, nurse’s offices and libraries. A fourth-grader can take lessons in stringed musical instruments.

And in the real measure of achievement--standardized test scores--the schools in Fairfax, in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, outperform the rural districts. Much may be due to their more affluent and educated parents, but that is only an additional disadvantage for the rural children.

Achievement test scores vary by as many as 57 percentage points from one county to another, and percentages of high school graduates planning to continue their education vary by nearly 53 percentage points.

“If you come from a very affluent area, then you’re exposed to much more and better things. And we just simply think that’s wrong,” said Supt. James Blevins of Nottoway County, Va.

Added to that is the problem of violence.

At Balboa Elementary School in a southeast, predominantly Latino San Diego neighborhood, crime and vandalism are constant dangers. One young girl narrowly escaped a would-be kidnaper on the school grounds during daylight hours.

Librarian Mary Hormsley learned the hard way that locked doors aren’t enough to protect hard-won resources. Now, she ends each day by hiding the school’s laser disc video equipment.

Business and community volunteers aren’t counted on here. Aside from parents, not many volunteers showed up after one had his pickup truck stolen.

Teachers in poor neighborhood schools such as Balboa can find that their students’ needs are overwhelming. Teacher after teacher in Virginia and California tells of buying shoes and clothing for their pupils.

Cameron Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., an urban, highly transient community near Washington, D.C., houses a clothing resource center that drew more than 50 families during its open house last year.

“You’re forever seeing kids with their feet hanging out of their shoes in the middle of winter,” said Charlotte Cox, a third-grade teacher at Cameron. “It breaks your heart. . . .”

“It does take away from what you teach the kids because you’re so busy trying to be a mother and a father and teach them and everything.”

Cox has befriended 13-year-old Bob and his 9-year-old sister, Pam, students who call her Aunt Charlotte. When their mother and her boyfriend were in jail and other family members were unavailable, Cox took Bob and Pam into her home.

Their mother was in jail the week that Bob took the Virginia literacy test, Cox said. He was on the honor roll but still failed the reading segment. Cox blames his mother’s incarceration.

Disciplining students takes time away from teaching even in elementary schools, where kids who see violence on the streets have to learn to get along in the classroom.

On one spring day, Sinai Elementary fourth-grade teacher Brenda Fuller stopped her social studies class to focus on the disruptive behavior of a boy. By the time order was restored, the bell rang.

At stake is the future of these children.

Over the past decade, earnings of college-educated males age 24 to 34 increased 10%, while those with only high-school diplomas declined 9%.

High-school dropouts saw their real incomes drop by 12% in the last decade. They cost America $240 billion in lost earnings and forgone taxes over their lifetimes, studies show.

Statistics show that dropout rates in poor urban neighborhoods are higher than in the suburbs or rural areas. For the period 1987-89, the dropout rate in central cities was 6.2%, compared to 3.7% in the suburbs and 4% in rural areas.

The difference in education spending between these poor neighborhoods and the more affluent ones is startling.

The Coalition for Equity in Educational Funding, a group of 40 mostly rural districts in Virginia, says affluent school districts in the state spend about $8,000 per pupil, more than twice the amount in poorer counties. The group says it could cost the state $500 million a year to redress the imbalance.

The gap is even larger in other states. In Illinois, the most impoverished school district spends less than $2,100 per pupil while the wealthiest spends more than $12,000. The state average is $4,500.

Overcrowding and general physical deterioration of schools also can handicap pupils.

Most of Balboa’s classrooms are aging, mobile “bungalows,” and some have gaping holes in the ceiling. Half the students eat on picnic tables outdoors because the cafeteria can’t accommodate the entire school.

In Charlotte County in rural Virginia, only one school has air conditioning. Weeks before school ended last June, thunderstorms flooded the health room at Central Middle School, where a busy highway divides the campus’ two buildings and three mobile units.

Other Southside Virginia schools converted libraries into classrooms and cafeterias into gyms. At Halifax Elementary, teachers have become skilled at coordinating the 440 students’ trips to just four bathrooms.

By contrast, Crossfield Elementary School near Reston, Va., is just 3 years old and has the latest in instructional design and technology. Besides being fully air-conditioned with plenty of restrooms, its classrooms and even the gymnasium are carpeted. It has two theaters and a computerized library.

“It’s real nice,” said 9-year-old Allan Lamberti, who is enrolled in Crossfield’s gifted and talented program. “It’s not an ugly school. It’s clean. There’s nothing wrong with it. They teach us what we need to learn and everybody learns something every day.”

For children in poorer neighborhoods, there are other distractions from the day’s course work, some designed to help them overcome difficult circumstances.

In the San Diego schools, some children with brothers in gangs are pulled out of the classroom periodically for a gang-deterrence program that includes trips to the local police academy. Others receive special instruction in basic skills, a supplement for children who start out behind.

Many ghetto children who often see violence are counseled in peaceful problem solving, such as how to react calmly when shoved in line. At Knox, black boys participate one day a week in a pilot program aimed at improving their achievement and self-image.

Much of the extra help is directed at building self-esteem, “making them feel they have a future,” said Balboa counselor Linda Ziff.

Schools in rural areas face their own difficulties.

Transportation to and from school is the second largest expense in many rural counties. Charlotte County, Va., for example, has only 11,000 people spread across 471 square miles. Some bus routes run 50 miles.