Irvine Unified Weighs 4th Try at Parcel Tax

Bearing petitions and promising to battle voter apathy, a group of Irvine parents, homeowners, businesspeople and politicians is beseeching the school board to try one more time to pass a parcel tax that would save teachers’ jobs and preserve acclaimed educational programs.

PTA activists presented trustees of the Irvine Unified School District this week with about 3,100 signatures in support of placing the tax on the April 11 ballot, and the Irvine City Council voted unanimously to support a fourth attempt to pass the measure.

The failure of a $95-a-parcel levy in November--by 742 votes--has forced school officials to draw up a potential list of unappetizing program cuts, from losing art and music specialists to laying off a counselor at each of the district’s high schools. With a budget deficit looming, trustees said they may have to let 100 teachers go.

On Tuesday, about 20 parents pleaded their case to trustees late into the night, mixing strategy suggestions with personal stories about how Irvine Unified’s programs have helped their children.

Parent Margaret Ames braved her first school board meeting to pledge her support for the tax measure.

“I have a 6-year-old in first grade at Plaza Vista,” she said. “Over the last 5 1/2 months, I have watched this little boy, who masquerades as a Pokemon for most of his waking hours, blossom. . . . I learned today that the teacher who has helped Dilan bloom is a first-year teacher at risk of losing her job.”

November marked the third time that an Irvine Unified parcel tax received majority approval but fell short of the necessary two-thirds vote.

At the suggestion of trustee Michael B. Regele, consideration of another parcel tax will be placed on the agenda for the board’s Jan. 11 meeting.

Other board members have said that they are leaning toward supporting another measure but that they must move forward with budget-slicing in case the tax proposal fails again. The cuts must be made by March 15--the deadline for sending layoff notices to teachers. However, any layoffs would not become final until two months later--after the April ballot.

“From the board standpoint, we must clearly focus on our cutting endeavors,” Regele said before Tuesday’s meeting. “It would be foolish to build our endeavor on the possibility that the tax would pass if we put it out again. . . . You cannot count on that. You can’t even think of that. If it happens, it drops out of heaven.”

But he added Wednesday: “We must try once more, if for no other reason than we can.”

If the parcel-tax plan goes forward, supporters acknowledge, they would have to tweak their campaign strategy. The previous proposal faltered in large part because nearly half of the 19,000 people who identified themselves as tax supporters before the election never actually voted.

Trustee Steven S. Choi said he is overwhelmed by the community support he has seen recently but needs to know if it extends beyond the same group of activists who pushed the last tax plan, only to suffer a heartbreaking loss.

Choi said he feels strongly that proponents should try again, but “I would like to have a little more assurance that it’s not just self-serving among ourselves.”

One idea is to offer senior-citizen homeowners a voluntary exemption from the flat tax. State law prohibits school districts from using a progressive property tax to raise money for programs.

That would be a step in the right direction, said resident Hanna Hill, who opposed the November parcel tax. She also thinks that young families should be excluded from the measure and that tax advocates must do a better job of explaining the need for the levy.

Irvine residents, she said, “should not take elected officials at their word.”

A complicated set of circumstances led to the school budget crisis. Because state funding levels were set in the 1970s, when the district was home to more agriculture than today and had a smaller property-tax base, Irvine Unified receives $95 less per student annually from the state than the average district in Orange County and $100 less than the state average.

At the same time, Irvine has hired a corps of teachers well-versed in science, math and arts to handle those subjects in elementary schools rather than leave those topics to generalist instructors. As a result, it has up to 10% more teachers than most surrounding school districts.

Continuing those staffing levels and program offerings while other districts have cut back has led to the mounting deficit.

Over the past decade, Irvine Unified has pared a total of $12 million from its budget, largely by reducing administration and making other cuts outside the classroom. But it still is facing a $4-million deficit in its 2000-2001 budget of about $140 million.