Parents are stuck digging deep for public school

I made two trips to my daughter's public school on Wednesday, one to volunteer in her classroom and one to get shaken down for money. Either we moms and dads pony up an average of $1,000 per student by May, we were told by leaders of the parents group, or our beloved neighborhood school was likely to lose resources crucial to our children.

Guilt is a powerful motivator, not that it works very well on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or legislators. In January, the great state of California got an F from Education Week magazine, which put us at 47th in the nation in per-pupil funding when figured as a percentage of personal income. And that was before Sacramento announced billions of dollars in additional education cuts, which has prompted thousands of notices statewide on potential layoffs of teachers and other staff.

Let's start, however, with my volunteering effort at Ivanhoe Elementary, which is in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Supt. Ray Cortines is looking at having to slash roughly $700 million districtwide from the budget. He said it's not clear how much he'll get from the temporary federal stimulus package, but he knows it won't fill the gap. Which probably means we'll have larger class sizes and fewer employees, and an even greater need for parents to step up and volunteer.

I'm a bit of a laggard at Ivanhoe. Other parents, including my wife, put in far more time.

I was feeling guilty about that and signed up for an hour as a classroom aide to teacher Missy Morris, who, I can now say with authority, is vastly underpaid.

Ms. Morris divided the class into four small groups, two of which worked on their own. She took a third group and I took the fourth, and my instructions were to help the little rascals assemble a book using construction paper, crayons and glue.

Remember the guy on "The Ed Sullivan Show" who balanced spinning plates on sticks, running from one to the other to keep an entire kitchen from crashing down on his head?

That's how I felt.

I had kids on top of the worktable, kids under the table, kids yelling, kids determined to put an eye out with a stick and numerous fiascoes involving glue. Some of the glue tubes wouldn't squeeze, some gushed, and we had a spirited fight over one of the better tubes.

While this was happening, I glanced at Ms. Morris, who was able to instantly control her group with a simple clap of the hands, a trick that didn't work for me. I managed to survive the hour without any 911 calls, and would like to hereby say, to a certain teacher who honors the profession every day: