Vantage point: The hardest thing we do
By:
CSBA President Jill Wynns
Published: July 9, 2012
It is June as I write this, July by the time you read it. This is the time of year that school boards pass their annual budgets. Time for too many of us to make cuts to school programs that we know will hurt students and take away jobs from dedicated educators. Time to explain to parents and their children why their beloved teacher, principal, or school secretary may not be there when they return from the summer break.
This is one of the thorniest issues facing our districts in this time of torturous cuts to our funding. We have to look at the cuts from a budgetary perspective, keeping in mind the human toll but looking to the bottom line.
And, unlike the state, we cannot pass a budget that contains cuts which are never implemented and let the deficit roll over to the next year. Creative budgeting, or smoke and mirrors, may be fine for some, but not for school districts.
Faced with severely reduced funding, years of cutting, layoffs and disappearing programs, districts are desperate for any way to balance the budget. Most districts have had to abandon the small classes in the primary grades that made public schools competitive with private schools.
Many of us have been forced to shorten the school year. I won’t use the term of “furlough days;” sounds too OK, too much like vacation. We call them “forced school closure days” in our district. I am actually interested in terminology that describes the reality of the situation even more starkly. How about “lost opportunity for students days,” or “foolish short-sighted public policy days?” I have suggested that we get banners to put on our schools on the closure days that say, “This school is closed today because the state of California will not meet its constitutional obligation to fund public education.”
Now the legislative leadership and the governor have suggested that they will provide school districts with the “tools” to deal with the additional cuts that may come in midyear if the tax initiatives do not pass in November. By this they mean that they would authorize us to negotiate with our labor partners to reduce the instructional year even further, and do it in the middle of the year. We could have up to 19 such “closure” days in two years. These could mean weeks of lost instruction that those students could never recover.
When my board voted on the budget a few weeks ago, I saw the young teachers who received layoff notices. I heard the voices of parents, teachers and students who came to our board meetings throughout the spring to beg that we not lay off their teachers or end their favorite programs. I want the budget writers to hear them, and see them. We do not serve on school boards to deny students the education they need to be the best human beings that they can. We do it to serve our communities and their children.