School budget crisis lingers

Mike Swanson

The school board met Tuesday for the first time since issuing

preliminary pink slips to more than 50 district staff members, and

the basic plan arrived at in the meeting was to continue planning,

with more emphasis on paring.

In the “worst-case” scenario proposed by Gov. Gray Davis, the

Laguna Beach Unified School District’s budget is scheduled to drop

from $22,887,521 to $16,453,253.

Supt. Theresa Daem and the board of education continue to hope the

“equitable case” scenario they’ve proposed, which would involve

budget reductions but the fewest final layoff notices, will replace

Davis’ proposed budget.

In the meantime, they can’t afford to wait.

“If we go with worst-case, the potential for us is to end up in

September with a skeleton staff,” Daem said. “Having messed up the

lives of many of our wonderful teachers, cut back services severely,

we may then find out that we did indeed prevail [in pushing the

equitable case scenario].”

The most concrete idea that appeared to appeal to everyone on

Tuesday was Board of Education President K Turner’s suggestion to

organize a steering committee of various constituents.

Its purpose would be to collect and re-organize information that

members would then filter to the school board at its meetings between

now and May 15, the deadline for final layoff notices.

“The steering committee is going to organize the process, not come

to the results or make any recommendations,” Daem said.

To prepare for the worst-case scenario, board Clerk El Hathaway

suggested the board buy time for teachers by adding $2 million of its

$6-million reserve fund, and asked that other contributions be made

by teachers, administrators, superintendents and local organizations

to raise the budget from $16 million to $20 million.

Hathaway said the move would buy the board 14 months of time to

avoid laying off teachers and would safeguard against the total

devastation that would result from Davis’ budget cuts. In the

meantime, the board should rescind the preliminary layoff notices, he

said.

All constituencies in Laguna Beach would have to be involved in

the resolution, he said.

Board member Jan Vickers didn’t like the idea of having to go

through passing out layoff notices every year, which would be

“emotionally draining” to teachers.

Turner believed the plan was just too shortsighted to back and

maintained that, at this point, something from Sacramento has to

give.

“I’m concerned with El’s [plan] that we send a message to

Sacramento, ‘To heck with you, we can do it ourselves.’ That’s not

true, because this buys us a year of playing time, and that’s all it

buys,” Turner said.

The hope, however, is that the steering committee, which will

include Daem, Turner and community members and teachers to be named

later, can come up with something that the board backs and doesn’t

depend entirely on unexpected good news from Davis.

“We can’t do all the problem solving here,” Turner said.

If nothing is done, and the budget stays as is, then the district

won’t have enough money to run even an ordinary school, much less an

extraordinary one, Daem said.

“If we do the most basic program,” she said, “with all class sizes

at the outer limits, we still don’t have enough money to have a basic

office staff, a principal at every site, and enough people in the

district office to meet all the bureaucratic requirements of the

state.

“It just doesn’t stack up.”

Meanwhile, the “letters, phone calls and e-mails” campaign among

residents continues.

Beth McCombs, mother of four children and prominent letter writer,

suggested the board consult past budgets to learn how to cope with

more meager future ones. She noted that the district’s 2000-01 budget

totaled $20.7 million, more than $2 million less than this fiscal

year’s.

“If we do what Sacramento should be doing and go back and look at

what some of those increases have been over the last two years, and

we assess what our spending has been, it would help us get to the

proposal that Mr. Hathaway wrote.”

Daem said earlier in the meeting that the district budget’s has

doubled in six or seven years, and board member Robert Whalen added

that it was at $10 million in 1996.

The board scheduled three more special meetings that will involve

the steering committee: April 8 from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m.; and April 15

and 29 from 7 to 8 p.m.

The consensus on the board seemed to be that there are viable

solutions they could agree to rather than waiting for good news, but

its members wished they had more than six weeks to find one.

“If we sit here and wait,” Whalen said, “our people are going to

leave.”