Students Shocked as Board Cuts Funds for Academic Decathlon : Schools: Saddleback District action could force the champion Laguna Hills High team to disband. Many other programs will be lost under a $4.3-million budget-reduction plan.

Funding for the Academic Decathlon program in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District was eliminated by the district’s trustees Tuesday night, a move that could force the state champion Laguna Hills High School Academic Decathlon team to disband.

In a long and often emotional meeting attended by a crowd that spilled out of the board room, the board of trustees unanimously voted to cut all Academic Decathlon funding in the district as part of a $4.3-million budget-reduction plan. Ironically, the team was honored by the trustees earlier in the meeting.

“It’s amazing,” said Laguna Hills principal Wayne Mickaelian. “Last night the board honored the team. . . . Now I think the kids are shocked. They are in shock.”

Mickaelian vowed to looked for private donations to keep the program alive.

“We’re going to do everything we can to try to make sure the program comes back to life,” Mickaelian said. “I’ll do anything I can.”

The program was one of 32 cut by the board Tuesday night. Also eliminated from the district’s $100-million budget were elementary school music and science classes, a remedial reading project the Model United Nations program, elementary school bands and choirs, high school counselors and librarians. The 32 program cuts approved Tuesday came two weeks after the board voted to lay off 81 teachers beginning July 1.

Seven sports programs that were on the chopping block--boys and girls tennis, boys and girls cross-country track, wrestling, water polo and golf--were spared. The board instead voted to make across-the-board cuts in all sports programs.

The trustees’ decisions came after an emotional meeting during which more than 40 parents and students asked the board to reconsider the cuts. More than 300 people, many carrying protest signs, crowded into the board room and another 100 stood outside.

The board members said that while they sympathized with the speakers, they were forced to make the cuts in the wake of Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to cut $2 billion from the state education budget.

“I have five children in the district, and between the board and the superintendent, I counted 21 children,” said Trustee Dore Gilbert. “Any decisions we make affect our children’s lives and our lives as well.”

Opponents of the cuts, however, took little solace from the trustees’ sympathy.

Michael Ochi, 11, a sixth-grade band member at O’Neill Elementary School, said that although he will not be at that school next fall, he is saddened that it will no longer have a music or science program.

“Cutting music and science isn’t any fun,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting. “People who like science won’t get to really study it until seventh or eighth grade, and music makes your creative side better.”

The $10,000 model United Nations program that was also among the cuts is a re-creation of the U.N. General Assembly, with students portraying the ambassadors of various countries as they debate a fictional world crisis.

Anna Gorman, U.N. chapter leader at Mission Viejo High School, said losing the district funding will hurt, but the group hopes to survive through private fund raising.

“But I don’t know if the chapter will be able to go to as many conferences, and that is where we learn our debating skills,” the 17-year-old senior said.

Brian Corley, a Laguna Hills High School junior, attended the board meeting to express his opposition to dropping the $556,000 remedial Reading Education and Development Program, which he said has allowed him to succeed in school.

“When I was in seventh grade, I read at the fifth-grade level and that’s atrocious,” Corley said. “Now I read at the 12th-grade level, but I wouldn’t be there without this program.”

The board also authorized administrators to study two possible revenue-raising plans: a parcel tax on district property owners, which could raise $4.8 million, and charging students for busing, which could raise $600,000.

The busing plan would charge parents $150 a year to bus their first child, another $150 for a second and $75 for a third. Additional children would ride free.

Times staff writer Lily Eng contributed to this report