High School District Plans More Layoffs

Officials of the financially troubled Antelope Valley Union High School District said Wednesday they plan to lay off as many as 27 more non-teaching employees and delay the opening of a proposed new high school for a year to cope with constantly worsening deficits.

The bad fiscal news came as the 12,835-student district struggled to balance a proposed $45-million budget for the 1992-93 school year, even after prior cuts that laid off more than 100 employees and forced across-the-board salary and benefit reductions for those remaining.

Although the board of trustees’ vote on the new layoffs is not scheduled until early November, board members Wednesday told administrators to include the additional job cuts in a revised district budget that must be submitted to the Los Angeles County Office of Education by Monday.

The district also plans to save $1.3 million by delaying next spring’s planned opening of West Lancaster High School until the following year. Construction will begin as scheduled in the coming months with state funds, but the district will not gear up to staff the campus, Giles said.

Other planned reductions include eliminating a typical $1-million health insurance fund reserve, cutting $400,000 from substitute teacher spending, trimming $416,000 for non-teaching substitutes, and slicing $200,000 from maintenance, district officials said.

In the aftermath of the decision on the state budget, district officials actually received some good financial news initially, finding that because of increased enrollment and other adjustments they could expect nearly $5 million more than they had assumed in their original budget.

But then came the bad news, as the district’s new team of administrators, brought in to help repair several years of fiscal mistakes by previous officials, discovered that the original budget also had not counted more than $10.5 million in expected expenses, forcing the new round of cuts.

Interim Supt. Douglas Giles said the district will save about $500,000 by eliminating as many as 27 non-teaching positions that were only half-funded in the original budget. The cut will affect such workers as clerks, janitors and groundskeepers.