Our school district is making cuts.

Nothing you haven’t seen before, I’m sure. They’ve just approved eliminating:
Buses
GATE
AVID
After school Tutoring
Band
crossing guards
all sports
summer school
CAHSEE support
elementary music education
2 schools are being closed
and other services are being eliminated.

Btw, they’re having a ground breaking next weekend for a new math and science building at my children’s school. Can’t they do math and science in the old building until they solve the budget crisis? They’re also building another H.S. and middle school. Last year, all we heard about is how many new projects they have and now they can’t afford crossing guards and buses.

We live on the very outskirts of the district (the forgotten part) and it would take them 1 hour and 12 minutes to take public transportation to school in the morning. This includes a 25 minute walk on streets with truck traffic and no sidewalks.
Or they could walk and that would take them 1 hour and 21 minutes and only some areas have no sidewalks. Either way, they’d have to leave the house at 6 am to get to school by 7:20 start time. Or I could take them and they’d be on campus at 5:30 am, I suppose.

Basically, and I heard this from my son, who heard it from his teacher. They want parents mad so that they can blame the teachers. They want the teachers to take a 9% pay cut. So, they want us to blaming teachers when really it’s because the superintendent and the BOE can’t budget properly.

The board meeting is next thursday, I’m going and I’m angry. If this goes through, I’ll have to transfer my sons out of the district during my oldest son’s senior year.
Oddly enough, the nearby district has a high school that is a 20 minute walk from our house, but I hate doing this during my son’s senior year.

Any advice on what to do or say at the meeting? I doubt I will be able to speak, but I’d like to voice an opinion in support of the teachers and keeping the necessary services.

How's this theory?

If they want to get rid of schools that can happen inside of 18 years if people quit having babies.

I know, ridiculous, but as a theory it holds water, eh?

CNN had a report on a school that has no money to buy instruments for their music class, so the students were told to play a pencil. I kid you not, they had to hold the pencil to their mouth like it was a clarinet & then 'play' it. As someone who played in a band, I can tell you that that in no way simulates what it takes to learn how to play an instrument!

are you saying that my hours of air guitar practice is for naught?

:mad:

...states pay for bricks-and-mortar, so building is easy. (Here it's a 90-10 march.)

Actually staffing said buildings is the hard part. All the stuff you listed is, however, 100% funded by the district, less the aid-to-local-government from the state, which varies depending on how rich your district is alleged to be.

The new math and science building is costing around 16 million.
8 million was raised through the bond measure, with matching funds from the state.

They actually have the money in the budget now for all these programs, according to their projections, the money will run out in 5 years.

We see LTTE about this but the funds are legally restricted.

But what's the use of a new math and science center when they don't have anyone to staff it and the kids don't have access to tutoring after school?

The plans for the new building are insane, instead they should improve the buildings that they have now.

Basically, they have the money for both, they're just "worried" that it will run out in 5 years.

sometimes it's cheaper to built anew. I think building maintenance is part of the operating funds, not capital.

and they're bungalows with no running water.

Mostly things like that.

School district's hide a lot of money, and they are creative about it. You only hear what they want you to hear. But the numbers don't lie. My district went through this, with the doom and gloom scenario. Of course, we were in the middle of contract negotiations. During this, in which the board wanted no salary increase, or step movement, eliminating of several sports, and cutting 5 programs, we found out that they had spent over $3,000,000 on legal fees. They were paying a lawyer to negotiate our contract $180 an hour, and that included his 8 hour round trip drive to our district. Times that by 25 meetings over a year and a half, plus telephone calls, billable hours, etc. They lost a court case where they fired one of our members illegally. This member settled for a $50,000 payment, and the school reneged on that. The legal fees for this case is over $100,000 or double what it would have cost to settle.

Only when the community found out did the board switch directions. Supposedly, budgeting is an inexact science, which no one can predict, and it changes hourly, so let's not point fingers but move on. That was their take on it. They also found money to buy out 6 people close to retirement to keep furloughs to a minimum so they didn't look so bad.

You need to go to the meeting in numbers, speak you piece, use specific examples from the budget, ask how you can afford buildings but not the staff to work them, etc. Good luck, I hope it works out well for you.

I don't know the details but do know that the sped department has become edu-terrorists this year and they're getting away with it. We are stretched to the limit and the demands they are making are unreasonable and time consuming. They aren't in the kids' IEPs, most of the time. We may have recourse through the big bad teachers union - that is still working itself out. If it doesn't change soon, there will be an explosion.

The money tied up in the lawsuit or settlement has affected our academic programs and is a result of a previous administration's lack of oversight.

personally i don't think teachers get paid enough!!! i hope that people will listen to you. it seem an all out general class warfare and people are going to take their problems out on public employees in general. so much easier than dealing with the real problems. they want their kids to get a great education and not have to pay for it. then you have administrators that seem to not know how to budget properly. hope it works out.

ask teachers and classified staff to take pay cuts, and if they don't, blame us for the cut programs.

FWIW, in my district we've voted to take 4 pay cuts in a row to avoid any more RIFs.

You should know, before you go to a meeting, that school funding comes from different sources, different accounts, and the funding from each source can only be used for certain things.

For example, you can't use construction funds for payroll.

All of those cuts to programs and services are basically payroll cuts; that's where the expense is.

It sucks. The budget situation IS dire, though. Schools are funded through tax revenues, and in an economic depression, tax revenues keep falling. The cuts to funding are real. How districts handle cuts locally can vary. We took voluntary salary cuts. Two years ago, 50 people got RIF notices, so we took the cuts to avoid more lay offs. Our district also cut programs (PE and Music at the elementary and K-8 schools; that eliminated prep for teachers, and added PE and "music" to the regular teacher's duties,) and cut school days. Last year our students got 144 days of school.

In some areas, the budget situation is made worse by declining enrollment. The fewer students, the less money. We've seen people migrating out because our unemployment levels are higher than the national average. They're moving to where they hope they can find a job.

Your district may not be able to avoid cuts in services. Whether or not they can mitigate some of those cuts by getting employees to agree to pay cuts depends on the relationship they have with their employees. If it's been a positive relationship, teachers and classified staff will probably give some. If not, then they may not.

Is the district office cutting their own salaries and positions FIRST?

I would also recommend getting an outside agency to do an audit. Our national union audited our district's budget last year and it was very helpful to get that report before we negotiated for this year's contract.