School Pay Cuts May Be Deeper : Education: San Diego Unified will have to slash an additional $16 million if the state education budget comes up a projected $1.3 billion short.

Salary slashes for San Diego city schools employees, beyond a 1% cut already requested by trustees, appear inevitable given the looming state budget deficit, the head of the San Diego Teachers Assn. said Tuesday.

For that reason, negotiations between trustees and the district’s five unions, including the behemoth teacher association, are proceeding slowly, said Hugh Boyle.

“The potential cuts are going to be more after we get word from Sacramento (early next month) on the extra amount that the state may be short,” Boyle said. “Therefore, it makes more sense to take a clearer position (in bargaining) once we know what the bottom line is going to be.”

Informal soundings from the state Capitol indicate that California’s education budget might be more than $1.3 billion less than estimates made earlier this year, and could require San Diego Unified to cut an additional $16 million beyond the $9.6 million it already targeted on May 6.

Of that $9.6 million, the trustees want $4.2 million, or just under 50%, to come from its 10,600 employees in the form of a 1% salary reduction.

“Yeah, it’s pretty clear that there will be” salary rollbacks for employees, Bill Harju, executive director for the teachers association, said Tuesday. “The only other real options are to cut programs or increase class size, and I don’t hear a lot of sentiment among people for that, even from our own members.”

The school board rejected proposed cuts in music, counseling and athletics earlier this month in its first round of budget cuts, opting for the $4.2-million cut in employee salaries, $2.3 million in central office cuts and about $2.8 million in school academic programs.

But, depending on how much the state financial situation worsens, those programs saved up until now could again be in jeopardy.

“My assumption is that any final package has to be a combination of central office cuts already made, employee givebacks and program cuts,” Supt. Tom Payzant said Tuesday. “It’s not possible or appropriate to balance only in one area.”

Payzant declined to be specific about how much more sacrifice he might propose for employees. The district must have an agreement with its unions by late June, or trustees will put rollbacks in place unilaterally in order to meet a July 1 legal deadline for a 1992-93 school year salary schedule.

“I think the union leadership understands the severity of the crisis, but the key question is how much the unions feel is their part” to sacrifice, Payzant said Tuesday.

Harju, for his part, declined to say whether he believes that employees should shoulder 50% of the additional cuts that everyone is forecasting.

But Boyle said that “you can’t throw some people out of work” through wholesale elimination of academic programs “so that other people can continue to work at their present salary.”

University High School Principal Mary McNaughton said Tuesday that, “realistically, everyone knows that we’re going to have some kind of a cut, for teachers, for principals, for everybody.”

“I’m certainly not excited about it, but at least I’m going to have a job, and that’s no small consideration when I see the news about General Dynamics losing thousands of jobs or the news at San Diego State” about hundreds of layoffs for tenured professors, she said.

“These are hard times for everybody, and one sector can’t be exempt from some kind of cut.”

Trustee John de Beck, a former teacher and teachers association official, labeled the alternatives to salary rollbacks “as cutting programs left and right, cannibalism, selfishness--in short, shared misery-making.”