CLASS-SIZE WARFARE

By Romesh Ratnesar

The move seemed routine enough in a school system strapped for cash. In late September, New York City school officials laid off a fourth-grade teacher at Public School 41 in Greenwich Village, dispersing her students into the school's four other classes. That pushed the average fourth-grade class size from 26 to 32. It also pushed parents over the edge. Within days of hearing the news, a group of parents cobbled together $46,000 to cover the teacher's salary. When city schools chancellor Rudy Crew nixed the buyout, saying it would "adversely affect the opportunity for equity" among the city's schools, the parents went to court and took to the streets. After a week of rancorous meetings, the two sides struck a deal last Thursday that reinstated the teacher, Lauren Zangara, and returned the parents' money--but barred them from any future attempt to pay faculty salaries. The city "will allow parents to make valuable contributions to their schools," Crew said, "within appropriate limits."

The rumble in the Village highlighted a quandary facing middle-class parents across the U.S. With state and local governments slashing public-school budgets, parents often face an unhappy choice: supplement their children's creaky classrooms with their own cash or stick the kids in pricier, more exclusive private schools. While parents have long held bake sales and sold raffle tickets to drum up extra funds for local schools, fund raising today is growing more elaborate and controversial. In Bowie, Md., a nonprofit foundation set up by parents is helping finance a $5 million auditorium. In Winchester, Mass., the Foundation for Educational Excellence dispenses $50,000 a year in grants to enterprising teachers. And public-school boards in most major cities say parents are free to kick in for everything from clean football uniforms to new computers.

So why all the fuss about P.S. 41? Well, buying extra classroom materials is one thing; buying extra teachers is another. When directed toward items like staff salaries, educators say, private funds can widen the disparity between schools in poor neighborhoods that rely on government funds, and those in middle-class communities that can tap off-the-books parental money. Even some parent advocates got uneasy over the New York parents' brazenness. "The running of public schools should be the responsibility of the public through tax monies," said Lois Jean White, president of the national PTA. Other critics weren't so diplomatic. "It's not an 'extra' when you're talking about subsidizing salary for a teacher," says Jonathan Kozol, author of the 1991 book Savage Inequalities. "The moral justification of public education is being ripped apart."

Several parents did threaten to relocate their children to private schools if Crew didn't reinstate Zangara. But the parents refuted the image that they were pampered yuppies with money to burn, pointing out that the school has working-class families too. They also say that the loss of one teacher would make the size of each fourth-grade class 10 students larger than the state average. Said P.S. 41 father Fred Moshary: "Parents anywhere would have done the same thing." Those words were prophetic. At week's end, parents of second-graders in nearby Queens had raised $20,000 toward saving a teacher from the budget ax. They vowed not to rest until they succeeded.

--By Romesh Ratnesar. With reporting by Elaine Rivera/New York

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK