CHAPEL HILL -- School officials with the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district have asked state representatives for help preserving after-school programs and teacher assistants.

State and federal budget changes have made funding crucial offerings difficult, Superintendent Neil Pedersen told U.S. Rep. David Price, state House representatives Verla Insko and Joe Hackney, state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird and state school board chairman Howard Lee this week.

As Pedersen expressed the district's wishes -- including reducing class sizes and maintaining after-school tutors -- the federal No Child Left Behind mandate was a common theme. One-on-one or small-group learning is a major component of succeeding under its regulations, he said, which demand proficient scores from students based on race, disability, language skills and family income.

"We at the state board have not done as good a job as we need to do of explaining this to legislators," Lee said. "I think there's a value there that we have to sell."

Teachers' assistants

Currently, each district elementary school is missing a teacher's aide. Though the state once funded teachers and assistants on a one-to-one ratio, that was changed several years ago, and the district propped them up last year using only local dollars.

But the aides weren't included in this year's budget, and half of the district's second-grade teaching assistants were cut. The decision prompted unified criticism from the governance committees of every elementary school.

Pedersen and the board, touting the power of smaller classes and retaining aides, want nonlocal funds to cover the assistants.

"When you can significantly reduce class size, that's going to give you more bang for your buck with teacher's assistants," he said.

In the wake of No Child Left Behind, educators also appealed on behalf of their after-school offerings, which are key to boosting test scores of Latinos and African-Americans, many of whom attend free programs in high numbers.

"We see a real difference between programs that are fee-based and the ones that are free," Pedersen said.

After-school programs

All nine district elementary schools hold after-school programs, which care for 750 students. Each program costs parents $165 a month per child, and only 15 percent of the programs are financially supported through the state Department of Social Services. Middle school programs, funded through a patchwork of state, federal, town and county grants, serve about 1,000 students.

A more elaborate after-school program, Scroggs Elementary's Jumptime, has likely exhausted its grant resources. The district wants $68,000 from the state to keep it alive for next year.

The legislators seemed receptive, some acknowledging the benefit of keeping children supervised and safe.

"We don't need to be funneling children into our juvenile justice system," Insko said.

The district's pleas took on heightened relevance in light of No Child Left Behind ultimatums, which will gradually become stricter until grade-level proficiency is expected from every child by 2013. Throughout the district last year, only four schools hit the federal mark, all of them elementaries.