Clinton Says Proposed GOP Tax Cut Would Hurt Schools : Education: President seeks to frame the debate over how to spend federal budget surplus, using temporary classroom construction as backdrop.

NORFOLK, Va. — President Clinton said Monday that the Republican proposal to cut taxes by $792 billion over 10 years would leave fewer dollars for education and, standing amid a cluster of temporary structures in an overcrowded school, he predicted that the result would be “larger classes . . . more trailers and more leaky roofs.”

The president, opening a week intended to draw attention to unfinished congressional business as the House and Senate resume contentious budget discussions, sought to frame the debate over how to make the best use of the estimated $99-billion federal budget surplus.

Punctuating his message, Clinton donned a white hard hat, took a battery-operated screwdriver in hand and spent five minutes in Classroom 29 of the Coleman Place Elementary School helping union volunteers build a computer table. He placed 12 screws in a plywood board to attach the tabletop to the frame.

“I’m not against cutting taxes. But I think we ought to take care of the big, long-term challenges of America,” Clinton said later, speaking to several hundred parents, students and other community members outside the 75-year-old brick schoolhouse. At the site, 10 portable classrooms, built of corrugated metal, have been erected to cope with crowding.

Clinton called attention to electrical wiring unable to handle the demands of a computer, and classrooms so full of desks that students get wet when doors are opened on rainy days. “Now, folks, we have to fix this,” he said. “This is a national problem.”

An estimated $112 billion is needed to bring the nation’s schools into good condition, according to the General Accounting Office, which found that about one-third of all public schools need extensive repair or replacement.

The problems at Coleman Place were offered as typical of the nation’s aging schools. Even some of the newer schools in some of suburbia’s most well-funded school systems wrestle with such problems.

At this Norfolk schoolhouse, storage areas are used for reading classes, speech tutoring and guidance counseling. Art and music teachers travel from classroom to classroom, rather than having work space of their own. In the prefabricated structures, some with only two small windows, terminals cannot be connected to the school’s main computer.

“When it’s winter and the kids in the trailers need to go to the bathroom, they have to put on their coats and walk across the parking lot through the snow, or the rain . . . to the main building,” Clinton said, dressed informally for his turn at construction duty in a blue work shirt over a red T-shirt, and khakis.

Clinton presented the problem posed by inadequate school space as a central element in his budget dispute with the Republican-led Congress, one of three questions facing the nation: how to bring jobs to communities untouched by the nation’s prosperity, how to make sure the Social Security System and Medicare can cope with the demands of the aging baby boomers, and how to meet the education requirements of a generation of American children even larger in number than the baby boom generation.

Republicans have argued that the surplus will make a tax cut affordable while also making it possible to pay off the national debt. In the pockets of American taxpayers, in bank accounts and in stock markets, the money that would otherwise flow to the federal treasury will fuel further economic growth throughout the nation, they say.

The dilemma, however, is that “they either have to get into the surplus produced by your Social Security taxes, which they promised to save to pay the debt down, or they have to cut what we’re already spending on education, on the environment, on health care, on technology and research. That’s what the problem is,” the president said.

The Republican spending and tax plan would halve the number of children in poor communities receiving federal education assistance, and more than 400,000 of the nearly 1 million students in the Head Start program would lose that assistance, Clinton said.

The White House argument is built on its assertion that budget law requirements would make cuts in such discretionary programs mandatory if the federal government’s tax income is cut.

“It means larger classes, fewer students, more trailers and more leaky roofs,” he said.

After the school visit, the president attended a Labor Day picnic sponsored by Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee and one of his most loyal supporters in Congress, before returning to Washington.

The three days Clinton is spending at the White House this week fall between 19 days spent on vacation, on Martha’s Vineyard, in upstate New York and then at Camp David, and a weeklong trip beginning Thursday to a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in New Zealand.

The president equated the nation’s education problems with those faced shortly after World War II, when Quonset huts were erected as school buildings.

The problem posed by an expanding student population and aging schools was highlighted by a report issued in January by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

It said the average U.S. public school is 42 years old, with school buildings that begin rapid deterioration after 40 years. The report added that older schools have fallen behind newer ones in connecting their computers to the Internet.

Meanwhile, the Education Department has reported, public and private school enrollment this year is expected to reach a record 53.2 million students.