A while back, I wrote a -column describing Kansas City's $2 billion public school fiasco, in which a -federal judge required the city to spend that amount on school facilities.

There was no corresponding improvement in educational results or dropout rates, just a continued withering of the district, which is now about half the size it was when this process -started, with many of its fancy new facilities closed and gathering dust.

You would think someone might have paid attention to all this, but, after all, it happened out there in the hinterlands. People in other places are so much smarter.

Word has now surfaced describing the new crown jewel of Los Angeles' public school system -- the Robert F. Kennedy Community School. This school, which will accommodate 4,200 students in grades K-12, cost $578 million. Meanwhile, the district has laid off 3,000 teachers in the past two years and has an operating deficit of more than $600 million.

The Kennedy School is built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where its namesake was assassinated. It includes murals of Kennedy, a swimming pool, a public park, -talking benches, and portions of the original hotel preserved as historic monuments. If this all seems a bit ghoulish, no one appears to have noticed.

A couple of other Los Angeles schools were earlier contenders for the most outrageous expenditure of taxpayer dollars: the $337 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School.

Los Angeles is not alone in the uber-school competition. New York, Boston and doubtless other places also have some high dollar entries.

While I am wholly in favor of a decent, even comfortable, environment in which to educate our children, and I understand that the day of the one room schoolhouse is long gone, it does seem a bit frivolous to build palaces for a small -percentage of a district's -children while the rest of the kids spend the day in tired old buildings without swimming pools or talking benches.

There is plenty wrong with American education, from aggressive teachers' unions to poor curricula to uninterested parents to bad food; if you have $600 million to spare, which Los Angeles doesn't, wouldn't it make more sense to spend it by addressing these broader -problems throughout the district than to pour it all into one Taj Mahal of pedagogical overindulgence?

These things can happen because many school boards enjoy a high degree of -autonomy and the all-too-human desire to leave behind a lasting memorial. In many cases, they have the ability to increase property taxes or issue bonds on their own authority.

Sometimes abuses can go on for long periods before anyone notices or gets angry enough to do something about it. Why should school boards be -different than any other governmental agency with easy access to tax dollars or borrowed money?

The United States spends more per capita on education than any other country in the world. Of course, the United States spends more per capita on almost everything than any other country in the world. It is beginning to look as if some people have taken notice.

James Sohn, the Los Angeles district's chief facilities -executive, has explained that the new Kennedy School was built as global raw materials shortages tripled the cost to $600 per square foot. He made no comment on his own management practices. He did add, however, "We don't anticipate schools costing hundreds of millions of dollars in the future."

It's a start. Now if we could just get kids to stay in school and learn something about civics and economics and social reality, we might get somewhere.

Fred Wolferman lives in Southern Pines. Contact him by e-mail at fwolferman@sbcglobal.net.