County Educators Meet to Assess Possible Damage From State Cuts

As news of Gov. George Deukmejian’s sharp cuts in education funding reached Orange County, school district business managers scrambled into meetings with superintendents and other administrators Wednesday in efforts to assess what could be devastating damage to district budgets.

Most of the business managers were not immediately certain of the impact of Deukmejian’s decision to cut $480 million from public school and community college programs, reducing the Legislature’s proposed 4.76% cost-of-living growth factor to 3%.

But many agreed that districts that prepared budgets based on the 4.76% growth factor are likely to be hit hard. Districts with year-round schools, in which funding will also be cut under the governor’s budget, will also suffer financial setbacks, they said.

Diane Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Ana Unified School District, said adhering to a 3% growth factor and shifting funds to keep the district’s year-round school calendar afloat will result in a $3-million budget deficit for the coming school year.

“The greatest impact to us would be cuts in year-round money, which will be about $2 million,” Thomas said. The cost-of-living adjustment cut will account for another $1-million shortfall.

Carole F. Bailey, director of fiscal services for Capistrano Unified, said the district will not suffer a deficit because its 1990-91 budget, which was passed in June, is based on a 3% growth factor, even though the proposed 4.76% would have poured an additional $1.3 million into the district.

While districts that based their 1990-91 budgets on a 3% factor may not suffer in the short-term, the impact of a lower cost-of-living adjustment is likely to become evident as operating costs rise and in future contract talks with employee unions.

“We budgeted on that amount (3%), and it’s painful because it’s not enough to cover our regular, ongoing costs,” said Robert Cornelius, assistant superintendent for fiscal services in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. “We’ll certainly be hard-pressed to give fair pay increases.”

Richard Donoghue, associate superintendent for business services in the financially strapped Orange Unified School District, also said that the district’s budget is based on a 3% increase, “but our concern is not the COLA (cost-of-living adjustment), it’s about some of the other monies that may have been cut. Some of those cuts could possibly nickel-and-dime us to death.”

“Nickel-and-dime” cuts like those mentioned by Donoghue could lead to bankruptcy for “60 or 70” fiscally troubled districts around the state, said Maureen DeMarco, president of the California School Boards Assn.

“L.A. is going to be hurt very badly,” DeMarco said. “You can’t take half a billion dollars out of the system and not have a major effect.”

Kenneth Hall, president of School Services of California Inc., a research group, said that unified school districts such as Santa Ana and Garden Grove--the largest in the county--would have received about $141 per student based on average daily attendance if Deukmejian had not reduced funding. With the 3% factor, each district will receive about $89 per student, he said.

“If a district is declining in enrollment, it will lose huge chunks of money,” Hall said.

The major effect on children, DeMarco said, could be an immediate increase in class size by districts forced to cut back on operating costs. Deukmejian’s plan to reserve $220 million for class-size reduction will be ineffective because the Legislature is not likely to pass a bill authorizing lower class sizes until January, meaning that the plan could not be implemented until the 1991-92 school year.