The Fort Bragg Unified School District last Thursday voted to layoff six people in an effort to bridge a $500,000 budget deficit.
The governor”s May Revise budget came out the next day, which Superintendent Don Armstrong said didn”t contain any pleasant surprises for the district.
The schools laid off two office assistants, who each work 8-hour days and two librarians who work 6.5 and 7 hours per day, leaving the district with two part-time librarians to cover four libraries.
The layoffs are effective July 1.
Also, the second round of layoff notices went out Friday to music teacher John Gilmore and art teacher Barbara Pedersen at Dana Gray Elementary School.
Gilmore”s and Pedersen”s layoff notices are a partial replay of the 2009 early budget situation in Fort Bragg, when 14 teachers were noticed, 13 of which returned to work the following fall, thanks mostly to Obama stimulus money the district received.
Armstrong explains about half the stimulus money was saved for this coming school year.
“2011-2012 is when things look like they may really fall off the table,” Armstrong said, pointing to an end to stimulus money and a darker and darker state budget figure. The state budget needs a two-thirds vote to pass any tax increases, which Republicans have pledged to block. With more than 10 percent of the state”s workforce unemployed and business revenues down, schools figure to get less and less money.
Gilmore has had perhaps the most tortured budgetary history of any Fort Bragg teacher, laid off about a decade ago, brought back, then getting layoff notices year after year, only to have his job saved at the last minute. The art and music teachers will be officially laid off at the end of their work in June. Whether a way to rehire them in late August, when they would have reported back to school, remains to be seen.
During previous budgetary problems, Gilmore and Pedersen”s positions were transferred outside of the main teacher contract, instead to be paid by the Dana Gray “discretionary” funds, Armstrong explained.
That apparently makes the two teachers easier targets for cuts than others.
Because they are paid with special Dana Gray funds, the layoff of the pair saves the district, as a whole, only half the 60 percent full-time salary of Gilmore and none of Pederson”s half-time salary. The layoff notices pass the decision onto the Dana Gray Site Council, Armstrong said. Each school in the district gets discretionary funds each year, but other schools don”t choose to pay teachers out of the funds.. Since teacher salaries grow each year, paying teachers this way is a difficult long-term proposition, Armstrong explained.
The entire issue became clouded with the governor”s plan to make virtually all funds “flex” funds, meaning the school board has discretion to use most educational funds for any educational purpose.
Trustee Michelle Norvell was the lone dissenter in two votes for the teacher and librarian-office assistant layoffs. She advocated finding other ways to bridge the budget gap, including looking at cutting back on instructional facilitators.
Two school principals and Armstrong took strong stands against cutting the instructional facilitator from any school, who coordinate and evaluate instruction as a whole. The facilitators were credited with playing key roles in turning district performance upward to a point where several Fort Bragg Schools have the highest test scores in the county, Armstrong reported. He said all high-performing districts use facilitators, but said the other employees also play important roles in district performance.
“Each one of these people do an important task, the state has put us in a very difficult position, at the state level there are billions of dollars less than there was in school year 2009-2010,” said Armstrong.
“We have a reality of less money, there are only a couple ways of doing this. By reducing some support staff, some things won”t get done,” he said.
The schools will be hurting with less support staff, but more cuts are likely coming, the small audience heard.
“I don”t know of any elegant solutions other than to say we don”t have a lot of choices; something has to go, if it isn”t this it would be something else,” said Armstrong. Several brainstorming sessions were held, with all the schools finding some cuts.
“This situation has gotten worse by the day… next year we are looking at bigger cuts, we don”t see anything positive,” said trustee Jennifer Owen.
Redwood Elementary Principal Mary K. Champagne suggested that teachers and staff drop a “retroactive” pay increase recently achieved in a new collective bargaining agreement. It was pointed out that teachers worked with no contract while negotiations went on and the pay increase went back to the effective date of the new contract.
Armstrong pointed out some of the give and take in the collective bargaining agreement and said he wouldn”t advise the board to entertain such an idea unless it came from the official representatives of the union.
Trustees discussed their decision to raise starting teacher pay and decrease the number of steps in the teacher contract. Both measures were intended to attract top teachers during a time when many districts are laying off excellent teachers and many top graduates are struggling to get jobs. That gives Fort Bragg, which is in a much better financial position than many districts in the state, a chance to attract top teachers to come and stay.
While the final state budget may follow the governor”s May Revise template, it may not and trustees could be faced with an even worse situation before school starts.
With the widely forecast darker future on everyone”s mind, Armstrong presented a report on imposition of a parcel tax. Unlike a bond, a parcel tax does not depend on assessed value, but imposes a uniform fee on each taxable parcel. The school district is allowed to exempt senior citizens from such a tax. Armstrong said in Marin, where he served previously, there were parcel taxes ranging from fire to schools. Mendocino County governments have yet to embrace the idea.
The city of Ukiah has recently looked at such a tax, along with some other local entities.
“We didn”t want to be the first, but we certainly don”t want to be the last either,” Armstrong said in an interview.
For now, the idea is in the theoretical stage and would take a popular vote and about two years to impose.
