Orange School District Seeks 132 More Advisers

After a year of wild fiscal swings and the threats of school closures and a teacher strike, the Orange Unified School District is hoping to weather future storms by attracting wider citizen involvement in long-range planning, Supt. Kenneth D. Brummel said Tuesday.

Orange Unified wants a greatly expanded citizens’ advisory committee to map out “a five-year plan” that will recommend direction for the district, Brummel said. The steps will include financial planning and academic changes, such as whether sixth-graders should become part of junior high or remain part of elementary school.

Expand From 18 to 150

By the end of this week, the school district hopes to have its 18-member citizens’ advisory group expanded to 150 people. The larger group, Brummel said, will study problems in the district. He said he hopes the study will find long-range ways to avoid the kind of fiscal cliff-hanging that the district faced in 1984-85.

“We had a tough year last year, but now I’m cautiously optimistic,” Brummel said in an interview.

He emphasized that the school district is still on shaky ground financially. “We have cut into our reserves in next year’s budget, and we’ll have just a little more than $1 million left in reserve out of our total budget of about $80 million,” he said. “Our auditors are screaming because they, quite properly, believe the district should keep at least a 2% reserve.”

The problem, Brummel said, is that residents want all the educational items the district offered during its growth years. Those years, before the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, were an era when subdivisions were sprouting and local property taxes were bringing in a lot of money for the schools.

6,000-Student Decline

Since the late 1970s, however, the housing boom and concurrent growth of students in Orange Unified have plunged downward. The district went from a high of 30,774 students in 1976 to the 24,476 projected to enroll this September.

“In recent years, we’ve been losing about 500 students a year,” Brummel said. “We’ll face that for a few more years until it levels off.”

Like many other districts in the county, Orange Unified suffers from the high cost of housing. Young married couples with young children to start the 12-year school cycle are no longer moving into the area as they did during the county’s high-growth, low-cost-housing days of the 1950s and 1960s.

“When you’re talking of housing costing $200,000 and up, you’re not talking about many young families who can afford to live here,” Brummel said.

Still, he said, the school district is getting ready for the 1985-86 school year in much better shape, in all ways, compared to the 1984-85 school year. Last fall, Orange Unified’s budget indicated a $2-million deficit by the end of the year. On top of that, the teachers’ union had authorized a strike to protest lack of a pay raise.

The district managed to give the teachers a pay raise and still avert red ink “by cutting into the reserve and halting all kinds of purchases of supplies and things like that,” Brummel said. A threatened closure of four schools, to save money, was averted when it was found that a budgetary error left more money in the district’s treasury than originally believed.

Sees Slim Pickings

Still, Brummel pointed out, the district has a slim treasury for the year ahead, and there are no prospects for increases in student enrollment that would bring in more state support money. The limited resources are all the more reason the district needs to have expanded citizen involvement in planning, he said.

“At last night’s (Monday night’s) school board meeting, we had one group seeking restoration of free (school) busing, which would cost $200,000, and another group requesting more for the libraries, which would cost $170,000,” he said. Brummel added that neither group had any recommendation as to where the money would come from.

Brummel said he hopes the expanded citizens’ advisory committee, among its other duties, will devise ways to tell the residents of the district that demands for educational items must be realistically geared to available money.

The expanded committee, he said, has been asked to submit its five-year plan to the school board by January, 1986.