Budget Deadlock Worries Schools : Education: Administrators say state budget stalemate has made it hard for them to plan for expected cutbacks.

Each day of the state budget impasse soaks up a day of planning for schools that will have to struggle that much harder to absorb deep cuts, San Diego County school administrators said Thursday.

“I’m dammed mad at the governor and the Legislature. It’s totally inexcusable that our political process in this state can be mired down as it has,” Poway Unified Supt. Robert Reeves said at a press conference that included representatives of the Grossmont, Carlsbad and San Diego school districts.

The monthlong budget stalemate has limited the amount of planning school districts can do. If the districts, which are already a month into their fiscal year, must slice more from their budgets than the 8% most have planned for, they will be squeezed for time to make those cuts, school officials said.

“Instead of spreading, say, a $5-million cut over 12 months, we are going to have to spread it over 10 months, and that means the cuts will have a greater intensity,” said Fred Martinez, assistant superintendent at the Grossmont Union High School District.

“We’re doing a lot of guessing. We are guessing what the budget will be, we have to guess what the enrollment is, we have to guess at what our staffing should be,” Martinez said.

All of the school districts have passed the point where they can lay off teachers and counselors if cuts deeper than 8% are necessary, as would be the case under Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed $2.1-billion cut in education, the administrators said.

That means the brunt of cuts above the ones already anticipated would land on classified employees such as custodians and clerks, and on supplies and maintenance, said Henry Hurley, controller for San Diego city schools.

“The budget stalemate limits the planning that we can do. We have year-round schools that have already started,” said Hurley, whose district this year planned for $30.5 million in cuts from their $403-million general fund budget, one year after more than $22 million was axed.

Some districts will be opening for school in 34 days, and those on year-round calendars are spending money they aren’t sure they will have.

“We don’t know where we are going. We have no idea of what we need to cut and how to balance our books,” Reeves said. “What we are trying to tell the governor and the Legislature is ‘Let us know what it is we have to do so we can get about the business of doing it.’ ”

But the not knowing isn’t the only issue that angers school officials.

Wilson’s proposed $2.1-billion cut in education, contrasted with the Democrats’ proposal to slash $605 million from schools and universities, would cost the schools in the county between $80 million and $100 million.

The state of education in California in the year 2000 “will probably be equal to that of the states of Mississippi and Alabama” if things continue, said Reeves, who proposed raising taxes to fund education.