Williams verses the State of California, the class action suit filed by civil rights and other organizations on behalf of schoolchildren, claims that the state has allowed students to attend schools in poor condition, with untrained teachers and with inadequate resources. It says the students in deprived schools are disproportionately non-white and that many are learning English as a second language.

"The staggering range of disparity in public education in this state offends the core constitutional principle of equality," the suit says. The suit focuses on 46 public schools, describing things like teachers who lack training, students forced to share textbooks, crowded classrooms and unsanitary restrooms,"

"Lack of books, lack of teachers, lack of college counselors, there weren't enough desks for the students, there weren't enough working restrooms,"  said Cindy Diego, 19, a plaintiff in the suit. Ms. Diego graduated in 2001 from John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles and has a sister there who has told her that conditions have not changed much, but that now, "they have more working restrooms."

California Will Spend More To Help Its Poorest Schools. (National Desk) Nick Madigan.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 The New York Times Company

If 16-year-old Eliezer Williams has his way, rats will no longer scurry through classrooms in California, and every student will have books, a place to sit and a clean bathroom to use. Eliezer is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 1.5 million California students, most from poor neighborhoods. The lawsuit accused the state of denying poor children adequate textbooks, trained teachers and safe classrooms.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, plans to announce Friday that California has settled the suit by agreeing to the demands that the students receive equal access to basic instructional materials in all core subjects and that they be taught by qualified teachers in sound and healthy schools. The proposed settlement, which is subject to approval by a judge, would require the state to devote as much as $1 billion to repairs and upgrades to 2,400 deteriorating, low-performing schools. It would also provide almost $139 million for textbooks this year alone.

''This means that every child counts,'' said Mark D. Rosenbaum, legal director of the Southern California branch of the A.C.L.U. The deal, Mr. Rosenbaum said, ends ''decades of neglect and indifference.''

''We were in classrooms where kids had to share space with rats,'' he said. ''We saw essays posted on a board in an elementary school where kids had written about the prevalence of rats in their classrooms.'' While touring schools to research the lawsuit, Mr. Rosenbaum said, he found children who had defecated in class because restrooms were out of order. In some classrooms, he said, rain poured through holes in ceilings.

Citing a Harris poll, Mr. Rosenbaum said that one million to two million students did not have books for use in school or to take home for study, and that schools with high concentrations of black and Latino students were 74 percent more likely than predominantly white schools to lack sufficient textbooks.

In Eliezer's case, books were so scarce at the Luther Burbank Middle School in San Francisco, which he attended when the lawsuit was filed, that the books had to be shared, and teachers were forced to photocopy texts so students could do homework. He said a dearth of desks meant that students often had to push desks from one classroom to another. ''It was strange,'' Eliezer said in a telephone interview on Thursday. ''This is a pretty big state and I thought we'd be able to afford enough books for everybody.''

He said the bathrooms were sometimes ''filthy and dirty'' and that ceiling tiles were missing in the gymnasium, prompting fears that some of the remaining tiles could fall and hit someone. In the locker rooms, he said, doors were bent and locks broken. Eliezer said he took pictures of the damage. The school he attends now, Balboa High School in San Francisco, where he will be a senior in the fall, is ''a little bit better,'' Eliezer said, but not perfect. ''The boys' bathroom was closed for half the year, at least, last year,'' he said. ''It was out of order, flooded, just messed up. It took time to fix.''

The administration of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who was ousted last year in a recall election, spent about $18 million fighting the lawsuit.

Lawyers for the state argued that poor students were unlikely to do better in school even if they had the same educational benefits as children who were not poor. They also said the responsibility for ensuring educational equality belonged to local governments.

But the plaintiffs argued that the state had denied thousands of children their fundamental right to an education under the California Constitution.

''Children who lack the bare essentials necessary for an education,'' said Mr. Rosenbaum, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, ''can hardly be expected to achieve.''