School Officials Say Layoff Notices Are Not Idle Threats This Time

Some see it as an annual rite in which school officials put on sack cloth, pour ashes on their heads and go about warning the citizenry that public education is in big trouble.

But this year, as the school budgeting ritual begins, officials say they are not crying wolf about the possibility of teacher layoffs, larger class sizes and elimination of some programs.

“There is even more moaning and groaning than usual,” said one South Bay administrator, noting the current controversy over Gov. George Deukmejian’s tentative budget for 1987-88. Deukmejian, who emerged as a champion of the state’s public schools in his first four years in office, maintains that his budget contains a net 3% increase for education in a time of tight revenues. South Bay school officials are nearly unanimous in condemning the governor’s budget, saying it actually provides for a 1.1% increase or less.

The controversy also has brought out longstanding complaints that state financing of education, besides being inadequate, is fraught with uncertainties and unknowns, making it virtually impossible for the schools to develop long-range plans.

Budgeting for the next academic year must begin at least seven months in advance, leading to revision after revision, the administrators say. Even the “final budget” due by Sept. 15 is subject to hasty revisions as the schools plow through shifting winds of revenues and costs to the end of the academic year, they say.

The only certainty in the entire process, says Edward King, business manager for the South Bay Union High School District, is that school budgets must be balanced. That’s the law.

“If only they would give us a rational plan to work with,” King said. “We could learn to live with almost any level of financing, if we could count on what we’re going to get. But the funding is up one year and down the next, and it’s killing us.”

King said one of the most painful parts of the budget ritual is the process of sending out layoff notices to teachers who may not be rehired next fall. The action, which he said “disrupts the lives of the affected teachers and generally demoralizes the staff,” must be taken by March 15. That’s the law.

Last week, South Bay Union trustees authorized layoff notices for 10 of the district’s 195 full-time teachers to help offset a $1.2-million deficit in a projected budget of $19 million. A few days earlier, the Torrance district announced possible layoffs of 29 teachers, along with deep cuts in a wide range of programs. Officials there said the measures are needed to eliminate a $2-million deficit in a $65.5-million preliminary budget.

In Manhattan Beach, trustees voted to send notices to 10 of the elementary district’s 120 full-time teachers to cope with a possible $1.2-million deficit in an $8-million budget. Those layoffs, along with other staff reductions, will produce a net savings of only $300,000, but trustees said they didn’t have the heart to cut further into the school’s permanent teaching staff.

Trustees of the Palos Verdes Peninsula School District, rocked by the refusal of voters last week to approve a $2.4-million annual parcel tax, will meet Monday to review a list of possible cutbacks. District spokeswoman Nancy Mahr said the board has ruled out teacher layoffs or immediate school closures in the effort to overcome a $1.2-million deficit. The cutbacks, she said, are expected to come primarily in programs not mandated by the state, such as instrumental music, counseling, athletics and cultural enrichment classes.

Bigger Classes

Most other South Bay districts indicated that they also expect to get by for another year without laying off teachers. Besides cutbacks in programs not required by the state, the districts said they will focus on increasing class sizes and further trims in instructional supplies, equipment purchases and maintenance.

“We have already been through the amputational surgery,” said Richard Bertain, superintendent of the 1,900-student El Segundo Unified School District. “Now we’re down to the bone.”

McKinley Nash, superintendent of the Centinela Valley Union High School District, said he fears the potential loss of counseling and other programs that were started in recent years to give youngsters a “better chance in life.”

But, he said, the district may have to make the deepest cutbacks in its history to cope with a shortfall of up to $1.5 million in a $21-million budget next year.

“Our educational system cannot remain under-funded and continue to pull off miracles,” Nash said. Different perceptions of how much tax money should go to education, along with a growing frustration over budgetary uncertainties, has aggravated an adversarial relationship between school administrators and the government in Sacramento, officials acknowledge.

‘Difficult System’

“They’ve really given us a very difficult system to work with,” said Al Hughes, business manager for the Hawthorne Elementary School District. “All we can do is string together the few knowns that we have, and then wait to see what happens. It’s crazy.”

However, Lois Wallace, a senior official in the state Department of Finance, contended that unknowns are in the nature of the budgetary beast.

“We have a $31-billion budget, which is based on a host of economic and other uncertainties, and we have, at the very most, 18 months to figure out where the money should go,” she said. “If our income estimates are off by just 1%, we’re either short or long by $310 million.”

Wallace said school financial planners, “like good managers in business,” must accept uncertainty as a part of their jobs and learn to adjust to “inevitable cycles, instead of winging it every year on expectations that things will remain the same or get even better.” She said the state’s economy is still “robust after 52 months of expansion, but it has leveled off and that fact will have an impact on budgets at every level of government.”

55% of State Budget

In spite of a “relatively lean year,” she said, education continues to receive 55% of the state’s budget, an increase of nearly four percentage points since Deukmejian took office. With 30% going to health and welfare, and 6% to prisons, that leaves only 9% for everything else, from parks and roads to debt payment and administration, she said. Wallace said a recent report from the state’s independent legislative analyst confirmed Deukmejian’s claim that education is scheduled for an average 3% increase in funding in the governor’s tentative budget. When lottery money and increases for special education, poorer districts and other programs are included, education’s net gain is close to 4.5%, she said.

Local adminstrators, however, say that the 3% includes a 2.2% cost-of-living increase that does not start until Jan. 1, midway in the fiscal year. The actual increase, they say, averages out to 1.1%, depending on how various programs affect a district.

Jim Waters, superintendent of the Lawndale elementary schools, is among local administrators who remain unconvinced that education is getting all that the governor says.

“For one thing,” he said, “a significant portion of the funding increase is going only to districts with increased enrollment, which doesn’t help schools like ours that have stable or declining student populations. It’s like a shell game. They add some money here, take some away there, and when the game is over, a lot of the money is gone.”