City Schools Look at New Round of Cuts

San Diego city schools will be short $7.5 million to $20 million for next year, depending on how bad the state budget turns out to be, and this time more of the cuts are going to hit the classroom directly.

Supt. Tom Payzant spelled out the bad news Tuesday, recommending that trustees slash individual school discretionary money by an average 30%, cut back the junior ROTC program, eliminate school police night patrols on campuses after 1 a.m. and negotiate with labor unions for an unpaid vacation day on a non-school day during the year--all to save $7.5 million.

The loss of the discretionary money by all 180 district schools would be $3.22 million, about 43% of the $7.5-million cut, and would mean less ability to buy extra books, send teachers to conferences, hire special aides, purchase computers or pay for any enrichment program that students otherwise would go without.

“It’s going to make things really, really tight,” Grace Sherr, principal at Gage Elementary, a typical primary school, said Tuesday.

Jim Vlassis, the blunt-talking principal at Mira Mesa High, was more direct: “It will hurt tremendously.”

School board members indicated Tuesday that they might have trouble approving the cut as suggested by Payzant, although they will wrestle with the budget all this month and take public testimony for several weeks before making any decisions on a $570-million spending plan.

But Payzant said Tuesday that the proposals targeted for the first cuts represent the best possible outlook for the district’s 1992-93 budget. And, based on news coming out of Sacramento, the picture is likely to get worse--and sooner rather than later, he warned.

For that reason, Payzant identified another $2.5 million in cuts that could well be necessary. Those would include fewer secondary school counselors, ending elementary music instruction, ending career counseling in high schools and eliminating all special teachers for drug, sex and AIDS education, forcing untrained regular teachers in many cases to carry out the required social concerns curriculum.

Payzant proposed ending career counseling and elementary music teaching last year when trustees whacked $22.5 million from services. But he ended up taking the disproportionate share of cuts from the central administration--$10.5 million and 166 positions--after trustees balked at some of the more classroom-related targets.

There was no consensus among board members Tuesday about the second series of cuts.

“This year, we have to go to the heart of programs at schools, and that affects children,” Payzant said. “In the past, we’ve able to keep the (cuts) away from the classroom.”

Asked whether trustees might suggest better alternatives, Payzant said testily, “No one likes any of this, and this isn’t a perfect list, but the situation will require us to consider an increasingly narrow range of forced choices.”

None of his budget proposals includes any salary increases for the district’s 10,500 employees, a point that Hugh Boyle, outgoing president of the teachers union, made Tuesday. Boyle warned that the proposal for an unpaid vacation day might not fare well with his membership.

On top of the other bad news, Payzant even suggested that an additional $10 million could follow the first two cuts depending on how the state finishes its budget deliberations. The state covers almost 90% of the district’s budget, and there are indications that the proposed state budget over-funds education statewide almost $1 billion more than legally required, he said.

If the worst case pans out, Payzant would recommend that trustees consider a 1% salary rollback to save $4.2 million, an increase by one in the average class size to save $5.1 million, an end to preparatory periods for secondary teachers (meaning they would teach six classes instead of five) to save $18.6 million, and an end to similar periods for elementary teachers to save $4.6 million.