Dozens march against governor’s proposed education budget cuts

About 70 demonstrators -- mostly parents, students and teachers -- marched through the streets of Santa Ana on Thursday, protesting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts for California schools.

The gathering was one of about a dozen planned statewide in what organizers said was the kickoff of a series of events scheduled over the next several months in opposition to the $4.8 billion in education cuts proposed to offset the state’s deficit.

“This is ridiculous,” Randy Maynor, a member of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the national grass-roots community-based group organizing the protests, told the crowd gathered at Lowell Elementary School.

“To allow this to happen is criminal; our kids deserve better than this. We don’t have a spending problem; it’s a morality problem.”

Josue Vargas, the group’s state coordinator, laid the problem directly at the governor’s feet.

“I really hope he won’t take money from education,” Vargas said. “He’s a successful guy -- he must know that education is the most important thing in life to succeed.”

A spokesman for Schwarzenegger agreed that the governor understands the value of an education.

“He doesn’t want to make these cuts any more than anyone else wants to make them,” said press secretary Aaron McLear.

“But the alternative is raising taxes, and he doesn’t believe that doing that solves the chronic instability of the budget. That’s why we need budget reform, so that we don’t have to put the kids through this roller coaster of instability every year.”

At Lowell, where the protesters gathered, about 14 of the school’s 40 teachers have been told they could be let go.

One of them, Silvia Macias, said that such an outcome would be devastating for students.

“It would raise the number of students in the lower grades from 20 to 30 per classroom,” she said. “The quality of education will get worse; in this community we have lots of low-income immigrant families, and I don’t know how we’re going to succeed with the children.”

Dolores Aguilera, 66, who has two grandchildren at the school, expressed other concerns as well.

“They will have to cut after-school programs, books, supplies -- it will have a big impact,” she said. “There won’t be as many children who graduate to go on to further education.”

From Lowell, the protesters marched several blocks past Santa Ana High School to Heninger Elementary School, where they waved banners, chanted slogans and loudly acknowledged the honking of passing cars.

“I currently have 28 students; next year I may have 35,” said third-grade teacher Raul Garcia.

To attract attention during the demonstration, he was beating on an African drum and blowing into a set of Peruvian flutes.

“It’s just plain mathematics,” he said. “The more kids you have, the less time you can spend with those who are at risk.”

Nora Garcia, who teaches at another school and is unrelated, put it more starkly.

The proposed budget cuts, she said, “are anti-American. Our goal as a country is to move forward, but how are we going to stay No. 1 when we’re cutting off our children’s legs?”

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david.haldane@latimes.com