Students Protest Budget Cuts : Education: Hundreds walk out of L.A. schools in opposition to reductions in teachers’ salaries and prospect of larger classes.

Hundreds of Los Angeles Unified School District students, angry over shrinking school funds, skipped classes Tuesday to protest cuts to public education.

About 200 students left Belmont High School after their midmorning break and marched about 15 blocks to the Civic Center, where they blocked Main Street and shouted slogans from the steps of City Hall.

“My education has suffered because teachers are not giving time before school or after because they don’t feel it’s worth it,” said Fernando Gonzalez, an 11th-grader who helped organize the demonstration.

Another 200 students at Grant High School in Van Nuys ditched morning classes to hold a campus protest, while 100 youngsters at Porter Junior High in Granada Hills rallied against education cuts during their lunch hour.

The demonstrations came a day after a massive Labor Day protest by thousands of district teachers, who stalled holiday freeway and airport traffic for hours during a mock funeral procession--complete with a coffin containing student-written protest letters to Gov. Pete Wilson--proclaiming the “death of education.”

Deputy Supt. Sid Thompson, who spoke to the Belmont students when they arrived at district headquarters after the rally at City Hall, told them he understood their anger but could not promise that their fears about larger class sizes and shortages of books and supplies could be easily addressed.

“The way to satisfy them would be to say, their class sizes will go down, there’ll be more money,” Thompson said. “I can’t say that.”

The Belmont students missed three class periods and will be disciplined on a case-by-case basis, according to Principal Marta L. Bin. The students returned to campus after leaving district headquarters and were counseled by school administrators.

Last week Wilson approved a state budget that left the state’s per-pupil funding the same as last year, but will force school districts to borrow money from future state allotments.

Los Angeles School District Supt. Bill Anton told reporters Tuesday that no additional cuts to the district’s $3.9-billion budget should be necessary this year if the Legislature fixes technicalities that resulted in the governor’s last-minute vetoes of $509 million in school funds.

The Los Angeles school board has already trimmed $400 million from this year’s spending plan, with the bulk of the cuts to be taken from employees’ paychecks. Anton said district officials will be seeking ways to reduce the effect on employees, who are facing pay cuts ranging from 6% to 16.5% this year.

“We are taking every step possible to mitigate the harms of these cuts on staff,” Anton said during a school board meeting Tuesday.

Anton also announced that he will go to Sacramento today to seek state permission to shorten the school year and lengthen the school day. The move, which requires a waiver from the State Board of Education, as well as approval of the district’s employee unions, would enable the district to shift the bulk of the proposed salary cuts to furlough days, while still meeting state requirements for minutes of instruction.

United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s largest union, previously rejected an effort by officials to seek a waiver to shorten the school year by 17 days and has argued that programs and administration should be trimmed before employee salaries.

The school board on Tuesday also agreed to ask the state for permission to eliminate holiday pay for classified employees. The proposal must be negotiated with employee bargaining units.

At Tuesday’s meeting, former state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp told the board that a districtwide hiring freeze could save up to $20 million. Van de Kamp--who chairs an independent commission that is assessing the district’s finances--wrote a letter to the school board last week calling for such a freeze. Anton announced last Friday that there would be no new hires, with the possible exception of certain hard-to-fill positions.

Times staff writers Jean Merl and Henry Chu contributed to this story.