Parents Asked to Help Cut O.C. School Budget

Anticipating the deepest funding cuts to public education yet, the Irvine Unified School District mailed home surveys this week asking parents to help guide the budgetary knife.

The district mailed about 4,500 surveys to parents with children in the fourth, seventh and ninth grades, asking them to choose classroom and service programs that they believe are the most important and should not be touched and those they consider less vital. Surveying parents is one tactic school districts throughout Orange County are taking while preparing for state public education funding cuts that may reach $2.4 billion.

The Irvine, Santa Ana and Capistrano unified school districts adopted tentative budgets this week that spell out cuts expected in next school year’s programs and staffing. Although the budgets may be revised in the fall, the three budgets each outline a school year with fewer elective courses and a shorter school day at some grade levels, mostly in the junior high schools.

Under budget plans adopted Tuesday by the Santa Ana school board, intermediate-school students will have their seventh period cut. The cut will allow the district to eliminate about 50 teaching positions. The Irvine and Saddleback Valley unified districts plan to reduce or eliminate “zero-period” classes for junior high students.

Zero period--so named because it is scheduled before the start of the regular school day--allows students to take elective or enrichment classes beyond their normal curricula.

In Irvine, the proposed cut means seventh- and eighth-graders will lose their opportunity to take instrumental music and student government classes, Supt. David E. Brown said. Under the tentative budget adopted Tuesday, high schools in Irvine will lose all athletic programs except at the varsity level, and high school seniors would be able to sign up for just five classes, instead of six.

To prepare for the Irvine high school cuts, 11th-graders were surveyed Thursday and Friday to ask which classes they would be willing to lose.

The cuts in Irvine will save about $5 million and result in reductions of about 40 positions, including librarians, psychologists and a nurse. The district does not anticipate having to lay off teachers, Brown said.

Saddleback Board of Education member R. Kent Hann said his board’s action eliminated zero-period classes for all students except those who use it to take music or foreign-language courses. That move alone is projected to save $61,000 a year.

Tony Ferruzzo, director of secondary education for the district, said he expects the cut will permit only about 90 students to enroll in zero period next year; there were about 300 in the 1991-92 school year.

“I don’t think we had a choice. We’re out of money. We’re going broke,” Hann said, noting that in addition to making $2.3 million in cuts from its 1992-93 budget, Saddleback will have to use $5.6 million of its reserve fund.

“The cuts are beyond comprehension. We’re going to decimate this system next year,” he said.

Many school districts around the state also seem to be contemplating reducing their school days to absorb expected funding shortfalls, said John D. Gilroy, a state Department of Education expert in school-day requirements.

School district officials have been calling to ask about the bottom-line requirements for the length of the school day, Gilroy said Friday. Expected state education cuts have pushed school districts’ “backs to the wall,” he said.

“People are going over the requirements with a fine-toothed comb to see if they are doing more than the law requires,” Gilroy said.

State law requires public school districts to adopt a tentative budget by July 1, even though the state itself often does not adopt its budget until later. Because districts do not yet know how much money they will receive from the state, they adopt tentative budgets and revise them later.

Although the cuts might not end up as deep as expected, they could end up worse, Irvine’s Supt. Brown said.

“We want to have people avoid feeling that because (the budget’s) tentative, we won’t have to do these things, because we think we will have to do them,” he said.

Sal Mendoza, Board of Education member in the Santa Ana district, warned fellow members Tuesday that the cuts might have just begun.

“Ladies and gentleman, it’s going to get worse,” Mendoza said. “Brace yourselves for some really, really, tough, tough decisions.”

Times correspondent Jon Nalick contributed to this story.

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