Under a legal settlement reached last year, the city’s education department is spending more than $5 million a year to staff district offices, but in many cases parents looking for help at those offices would be wasting their time.

Visits by a reporter in the past two weeks to the 19 district offices situated apart from the regional offices disclosed that it was rare to find a community superintendent. At three of the districts, which are listed in the Department of Education’s guide for parents that was issued for this school year, school personnel told a visitor to go to a regional office because community districts no longer exist. At nine districts, school personnel said the community superintendent spends more time in the regional office. At three, city employees said the whereabouts of superintendents were unknown.

William Perez, a security guard, is prepared for visitors who come looking for District 11 at the Throop School in the northeast Bronx. He reaches into a pile he keeps stashed in the school’s registration book and hands them a flyer giving the address of a regional office miles away.

“We don’t have a superintendent here,” he said. “Most people are not aware of what’s going on. It’s confusing. A lot of parents are lost.”

The Bloomberg administration dissolved the city’s 32 districts into 10 regions three years ago in what the administration touted as an effort to cut bureaucratic waste and corruption. A group of local elected officials and the principals union then sued the city to block the consolidation. They said dismantling the districts broke state law and forced the administration to reinstate them in a settlement brokered by a state Supreme Court judge last year.

Superintendents “have certain rights and responsibilities that were never changed in the school governance law,” the president of the principals union, Jill Levy, said. “They need to have the full authority with the resources to back up that authority.”

The lawsuit was just one of the obstacles Mayor Bloomberg has faced in his attempt to overhaul the city school system and streamline its bureaucracy. Yet the settlement’s revival of the districts in their atrophied state hasn’t necessarily been a victory for the plaintiffs. Instead, the compromise between the two sides has produced an uncomfortable combination — vestiges of the old bureaucracy existing alongside the new structure.

A lawyer for the Department of Education, Michael Best, said the administration would rather not have to balance the two structures, districts and regions.

“We prefer less bureaucracy rather than more,” he said.

Education advocates say the main losers in the court battle were parents, who have been excluded from the decision-making and left confused about where to go for help.

“At least with the district office, it gives parents a real place to go. When you go to the region, you fall into a black hole,” a member of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council and former parent president in Brooklyn, Dorothy Giglio, said. “I’m not saying they were perfect, but parents could walk in there and get in some satisfaction.”

Previously, some district offices had whole buildings to themselves with staffs numbering in the hundreds. When the districts were dissolved, several of those buildings were turned into schools, and now many district offices consist of a converted classroom inside a school. Under the settlement, the offices must be staffed with a minimum of three employees, usually a superintendent, a secretary, and a parent support officer. The 32 superintendents are paid between $130,827 and $148,950 a year, and their secretaries are paid between $29,000 and $44,000. Department of Education officials and the plaintiffs have agreed that community superintendents don’t need to spend time in their district offices to get their job done.

Yet even parents who find a district superintendent at the regional offices may find them without much power.

Hector Nazario is a parent and president of the community education council in East Harlem. He works closely with his community superintendent and the district staff, but says, “Their answer to everything is ‘downtown.'”

“Special education in our district is a mess, and our community superintendent will try to fend for us to a certain extent, but it always has to be passed off to another office,” he said. “When it comes to the community superintendents, their hands are tied.”

Education officials say the districts are functioning according to state law. In the settlement, a superintendent’s responsibilities are described as supervising principals, overseeing budgets, maintaining discipline in schools and establishing educational standards.

“We restructured the system…and in that context I think they are working,” the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, said. “I think the key thing is the parents who have to go somewhere to get a service they need. Overwhelmingly they go to the regions, but if you have a local office that’s there, sometimes you get the answer right there.”

A department spokesman, David Cantor, said the education department “almost never” receives complaints from parents about the district offices. The department does not keep track of how many parents visit the districts, but at District 5 in West Harlem, a parent support officer said 35 parents, or less than two a day, have come in since the first day of school this year.

A teachers union special representative for high schools, Leo Casey, says that while returning to the district model is not the solution, what’s replaced it is just as bad.

“I think parents feel like they have no way of accessing the system right now, and that’s not good,” he said. “When you make these kind of changes, this is a system that is a public system, there should be public voice and public participation. Things that are so fundamental as the organization of the system are not things you would do behind closed doors.”

On a recent Friday afternoon at District 13 near Park Slope, a parent support officer, Pamela Payne, was the only occupant of the small corner office shared by the district’s three staff members. She said she wasn’t sure where the superintendent or his secretary were that day, but added that she has the superintendent’s cell phone number and is always able to find him quickly if a parent needs him.

Hanging on the wall was a handmade diagram of the divisions in the Department of Education crisscrossed with lines and arrows. Ms. Payne uses it to show parents how the bureaucracy works and where they can go for help.

“I take them up the ladder … at the region, that’s where everything takes place,” she said. With her assistance, she added, “The parent feels like they have someone to guide them up.”

One of the arguments for keeping the districts intact is the possibility that in 2009, the state legislature could roll back mayoral control. That could mean going back, in part or in full, to the old district system with community school boards operating at the district level.

“It’s my goal that we do not renew the reform and that we return the schools back to the communities from which they were stolen,” State Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who is one of the plaintiffs, said. “All they’ve done is added levels of bureaucracy, and they’ve usurped authority that was never given to them.”

Education officials say that it is unlikely the legislature will decide to restore the school boards, but in the meantime, Department of Education documents showing maps of the ten regions now include a disclaimer explaining that regional lines are “intended for informational purposes and not intended to change the boundaries of the 32 Community School Districts.”

But the regions may already be on the way out. The administration is advancing a new bureaucratic model, empowerment schools, where authority is taken from superintendents and given to principals in exchange for more accountability.

It’s unclear what will become of community school districts and superintendents as more schools — and perhaps all — are removed from the jurisdiction of superintendents and turned over to principals under the empowerment model.

All that’s clear is that the district structure will continue to exist, on paper and on payroll if not in a way that is always of much use to parents. Mr. Cantor said that unless the law changes, “community districts and the power of community superintendents will remain unchanged.”