GILROY
– Over the next year and a half, Gilroy’s kindergarten through
community college education programs could see cuts totaling at
least $5 million – if Gov. Gray Davis’ most recent proposal for
managing California’s $35 billion revenue shortfall comes to
pass.
GILROY – Over the next year and a half, Gilroy’s kindergarten through community college education programs could see cuts totaling at least $5 million – if Gov. Gray Davis’ most recent proposal for managing California’s $35 billion revenue shortfall comes to pass.
Education officials across Gilroy responded to the governor’s spending plan with mixed reviews Monday, calling the proposed education cuts of $7.4 billion mostly anticipated but nonetheless tough. They’re taking steps to have as much local control as possible over which programs get scaled back or cut.
Among the most seriously impacted programs are those that have money earmarked for specific purposes, potentially including special education. Across-the-board cuts of 7.5 percent for this year and an additional 1.3 percent slice in the 2003-04 school year would happen under Davis’ proposal.
“That’s big. The cloud just keeps getting darker and darker every time people talk about the budget. Here is just another example,” said Edwin Diaz, superintendent of Gilroy Unified School District.
These lean budget times are seeing education officials, including those locally, clamor for more local control of their budgets.
“We understand there is a fiscal crisis. We understand there is a need to take our share of reductions, but you have to allow local districts to have flexibility to decide what gets reduced,” Diaz said.
On Tuesday, Diaz will attend a budget seminar in Sacramento where he will get the state’s latest information on how education funding will be impacted in the months to come. On Thursday, at a regular meeting of the GUSD school board, Diaz will ask trustees to approve a resolution calling for more local control over how district budgets are planned.
Overall, cuts could amount to roughly $3 million in lost revenue for the district over an 18-month period.
GUSD has roughly $750,000 it can use to offset losses before it dips into its roughly $2 million of reserves, which have been treated like sacred cows by the state, being used only in cases of vaguely defined “economic uncertainty.”
“Of course, this is his (the Governor’s) proposal. It could look a lot different after the state legislature approves the budget,” Diaz said. “The good news is that he may be proposing some flexibility in class-size reduction.”
For instance, state law requires kindergarten through third-grade classrooms to house 20 students or less per teacher. Diaz hopes that ratio could be applied districtwide, allowing some classrooms to go over the 20-to-1 ratio without hiring an additional teacher at that school site, as long as averages across the rest of the GUSD kept the district’s student-to-teacher ratio at the required level.
Diaz has said that rough estimates indicate GUSD could save $500,000 if the state allowed for more flexibility in this area.
Diaz’s resolution, which was developed from a document out of the San Juan Capistrano School District just south of Los Angeles, has 14 separate actions that would lead to more financial flexibility.
The resolution would serve as a lobbying tool for sympathetic legislators in Sacramento. In addition to class-size reduction flexibility, the resolution asks the state to allow for delays in adopting and purchasing new textbooks as well as delays in administering tests for English Language Learners.
Diaz will also unveil three recommendations for overhauling the way the state gives education dollars to districts. One suggestion is to pay school districts based on total enrollment. Currently, districts are paid per how many students attend school each day.
At Gavilan College, new President Steve Kinsella has already started developing an expenditure plan to cut $1.2 million this year. After the school has time to adjust to the impact of those cuts, Kinsella said Gavilan will move on to round two, when a state funding reduction of 10.5 percent across the board gets implemented for 2003-04.
“These cuts are not a surprise, but they dig a bit deeper than we had anticipated,” Kinsella said. “What we need to do is identify and define our core instructional programs and their core support requirements. During years of higher revenue, Gavilan added lots of things. We need to get back to a central mission.”
Although Kinsella said the definition of the core curriculum needs to be spelled out, programs that prepare students for transferring to universities and for vocational careers are typically included.
It is not clear when the state will have its final education budget approved, but School Board President Jim Rogers said it could be by the end of this month, based on conversations he’s had with Assemblyman Joseph Simitian, the chair of the educational finance subcommittee.
