Newport-Mesa to Cut Non-Teaching Staff : District to Lay Off About 50 in $1-Million Cost-Trimming Action

An estimated 50 non-teaching employees in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District will be laid off before September, Supt. John Nicoll said Wednesday.

The Newport-Mesa Unified district serves the cities of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Nicoll said the school board voted Tuesday night to reduce the non-teaching staff by enough positions to save about $1 million a year.

“I’m not sure how many people that will be, but I would say 50 as a ballpark estimate,” Nicoll said.

Earlier this year, the school board authorized about a $3-million cut in teaching personnel for 1988-89. That cut resulted in 27 teachers being notified that they would be laid off by September, Nicoll said.

State Budgets Blamed

Nicoll said the district has had to trim teachers and staff because of a series of state budgets that did not adequately finance schools. The district has also had declining student enrollment for many years, he said, and state financing is based on a formula geared to student enrollment.

But after years of agony over budget problems, Newport-Mesa Unified is on the verge of fiscal stability, Nicoll said Wednesday. “I think we have hit bottom and are beginning to come out of it.”

Nicoll said he expects enrollment to remain constant in the 1988-89 period and to “start growing again very slightly in the years ahead.”

The superintendent also said that Newport-Mesa Unified is in better shape financially for next year because its budget, for the first time since Proposition 13 was passed in 1978, can be financed almost totally by the school district’s property tax.

Voters in 1978 approved a constitutional amendment, called Proposition 13, that essentially froze property taxes, allowing only a 2% annual growth in the assessed value of homes and businesses unless they were sold.

Having been stripped of rapid property tax growth, most school districts and other units of local government have relied on state revenue for most of their income since 1978.

Nicoll said Newport-Mesa Unified will break that state-dependency pattern in 1988-89. He said the school district’s property tax, despite the Proposition 13 limits, is now sufficient enough again to bring in most of the money planned in the 1988-89 school district budget. “Our budget provides for a 4% increase in spending, and we can anticipate that regardless of what happens in Sacramento,” Nicoll said.

He referred to recent moves in the state Legislature that call for cutting Gov. George Deukmejian’s proposed 4.1% increase for schools next year to about 2%. Nicoll said that Newport-Mesa Unified’s return to near self-sufficiency removes much of the district’s worry about the still unsettled state budget fight in Sacramento.