SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Gray Davis signed a special-education funding bill Tuesday, ending a 20-year legal battle between school districts and the state.

The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local governments for the cost of programs the state requires them to provide.

In claims and lawsuits filed beginning in 1981, school districts claimed they were not given sufficient money to pay for all the special-education services the state required.

The bill, which Davis and the school districts announced last fall as part of a settlement, gives districts $520 million to pay past costs of providing special-education services and $100 million a year for ongoing costs.

"This is a landmark agreement," the Democratic governor said in a taped statement played for reporters. "No longer will special education be forced to funnel money from other programs."

To pay for past costs, districts will get $270 million in this year's budget, plus $25 million a year for 10 years beginning this year. They will also get $100 million a year beginning this year for current costs.

Owen Waters, consultant for the districts' Education Legal Alliance, said at least 30 other states have similar special-education funding disputes and are interested in California's settlement.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint Tuesday against the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest, charging that there was a ``deliberate, massive and wholesale breakdown of compliance'' with a 1996 consent decree on improving special education.

As part of the decree the district had agreed to overhaul the special education system to integrate special education students into classrooms and provide better access to learning tools.

The district said it would ask a federal court Wednesday to modify the decree, which it called costly and unwieldy, eliminate its two court-appointed administrators and return power from parents' committees to district officials.

ACLU officials acknowledged that special education in the district is better now than in 1996, but they alleged in their complaint to the two administrators that there have been recent slips, including failure to provide required speech and language services to students and failure to fully train staff.

The district now has about 83,000 special education students, representing about 12 percent of its total student population.