This was a big week for the school board. Tuesday night, we had a workshop where the administration presented the universe of ideas of how we can close our budget gap, which could be upwards of $2 million in the 2009-2010 school year. There was a long list of measures, which mostly included cuts, but also included some ideas for revenue enhancements. This was not meant to be a forum for decision making, but rather just laying out the universe of possiblities, their financial impact, and their impact on the district and our students. You can view the entire list here. It included everything from cutting key areas such as music, librarians, literary associates, and P.E. teachers to reduction in staff salaries to reductions in areas such as building and field maintenance. It was frankly a pretty scary list.
The one big bright spot was the progress we’ve made in Special Education. Tom Green and his team have essentially developed the infrastructure and capabilities within the District to serve much more of our kids who have special needs. This will esentially allow us to provide better services to our students, and do it at a lower cost (since we need to utilize outside agencies much less). Kudos to them for the great progress here.
The District will be doing a number of outreach programs to get input from the community on the budget crisis and their opinions on how we close this gap. There will be a survey sent to teachers and other employees, and there will be a number of “town hall” type meetings for both staff and parents to ask questions and express their opinion. The District has developed a strong plan to get a lot of input to bring back to the board before any decisions are made.
Obviously one of the ways we can mitigate the problem is with a new parcel tax. On Thursday night, we discussed the results of the survey that we commissioned to get a sense of the community’s appetitefor a new parcel tax measure. The good news is that we got pretty strong support for a measure. However, it’s likely we’ll do a few things differently than last time: (a) we won’t combine the measure with the renewal of Measure D, (b) the measure won’t be in perpetuity, and (c) we won’t include a cost of living adjustment. Also, a number of members of the community are really rallying to lead the charge on the campaign and do a much better job than frankly we did with Measure S.
Next step is that the Board would need to approve parcel tax language by the first week in February — this would qualify us for a May mail-only ballot. I’ll keep you updated.
