Laguna Cuts Teachers’ Pay, Borrows to Balance Budget

Weary but relieved, trustees of the Laguna Beach Unified School District voted unanimously Friday to cut teachers’ salaries and borrow $850,000, bringing a sense of closure to a financial debacle that rattled this district to its core.

For the first time in two years, school officials said, the district can say with certainty that it will meet its financial obligations for the current school year.

“I feel like we just ended a long road,” said Trustee Kathryn A. Turner, who participated in the meeting via speaker phone.

Assured that they now will have a balanced budget and no longer fearing that the county will appoint someone to control their finances, school officials seemed eager to put the tensions of the past months behind them. Friday’s special session marked the 48th school board meeting since March 1, more than twice the number of meetings they normally would have held.

“I do want to strike forever the reference ‘fiscal crisis,’ ” acting Supt. Jackson E. Parham said.

Friday’s meeting followed a Laguna Beach Unified Faculty Assn. meeting Thursday night, during which teachers voted to approve a revised contract that cuts their salaries by 5%. Classified workers and nonunion employees had agreed earlier to similar cuts. The union workers’ pay cuts are retroactive to last July 1 and will therefore result in about 7.5% being sliced from their paychecks.

Parham is taking a 20% cut in his monthly $8,000 pay, retroactive to September, when he temporarily joined the district.

The salary reductions and the borrowing are necessary to resolve a deficit of about $1.4 million in the district’s current $13.3-million budget. Board members had a Nov. 30 deadline to balance the budget and avert a county takeover of the district’s financial affairs.

Parham said he will present “an exhaustive report” at the regular meeting Tuesday night that will show no deficit spending.

“Not that it isn’t tight, but it shows fiscal solvency,” he said.