Statewide fears of massive educational budget cuts have Morgan
Hill School District officials holding their breath, waiting to see
what else will have to be shaved from an already tight budget.
Statewide fears of massive educational budget cuts have Morgan Hill School District officials holding their breath, waiting to see what else will have to be shaved from an already tight budget.
“There is so much swirling around us, but we do know we will have to identify reductions,” Superintendent Carolyn McKennan said Thursday. “We are reasonably sure every area is going to sustain some reduction, even special education. This is such a pervasive situation, that I suspect that everything will sustain some level of cut.”
Gov. Gray Davis has proposed a $5.2 billion budget cut in education funding to take a sizable bite out of the estimated $34.6 billion state budget deficit.
The California Teachers Association and other educational groups and associations are protesting the cut.
McKennan, who was recently elected to chair the Association of California School Administrators, said the specifics are still up in the air.
“There’s lots of lobbying going on at the state level,” she said. “These (cuts) are all proposals at this point. That’s one of the things that makes this so difficult: we aren’t sure, when this is all said and done, what kinds of reductions the state will end up making.”
The district, which uses a performance-based budget system, already sliced $2.6 million out of this year’s budget, leaving an unbelievably low $92 undesignated fund balance. One of the programs that came under the knife was the elementary music program, which was rescued by band booster clubs at the two middle schools and the high school.
The budget committee, which will again used the performance-based budget strategy to identify possible cuts, is already beginning its work.
“Our task is to identify what we can do,” McKennan said. “We worked all day Saturday, we have a budget study session on Feb. 1. We need to be able to meet the needs of our children, and everything that supports the learning environment is important. We don’t know, at this point, which programs are going to take a hit. But we will brief the board on the 27th (the next regular meeting).”
The board has not discussed the budget cuts yet, McKennan said, but will do so during the Feb. 1 session. She said the district has not presented any recommendations to the board yet, but one scenario she doesn’t think is likely is across-the-board district cuts.
“When you are going this deep, you cannot go across the board,” she said. “In other words, maintain all the services you provide with significantly less resources. The danger is, when you go this deep, to say we’ll keep doing everything we do but just with less people. That’s just not possible.”
