In a district-wide e-mail sent out on May 21, Superintendent Steven Enoch announced that the San Ramon Valley Unified School District School Board had decided on which of the district programs to preserve.
According to the message, some of the programs that were saved include freshman and K-3 class-size reduction, librarians, fifth grade music, and middle school assistant principals.
Principal Mark Corti said keeping freshman class size reduction program, which limits the ratio of students to teacher at 24-1 for math and English classes, will allow for schools to keep valuable educators.
Although not mentioned in the e-mail, Corti also said that all extracurricular stipends which were cut in March, including those that pay for coaches’ salaries, would be reinstated.
But in the e-mail, Enoch said the school board was forced to make some cuts, including reductions of counselors, high school teaching positions, special
education paraprofessionals, and a $500,000 reduction in district level support services.
For Cal High, this means that next school year there will be four full-time counselors and one part-time counselor, instead of the nine full- and part-time counselors currently on staff.
District spokesman Terry Koehne said because of the economic situation, the state has allowed school districts to use categorical money, funds that had to be used for specific programs, for whatever purposes deemed necessary.
“(The district) is taking the categorical money from the state which was restricted to funding counselors, and putting it in the general fund,” said Koehne. “This helps save other programs, but it does mean reductions in the ratio of counselors to that from three to four years ago.”
In his message, Enoch also talked about negotiations between teacher unions and the district to discuss employee concessions.
Government teacher Bob Donovan is set to be a part of the union’s negotiating team that will take part in discussions with the district in July.
“It’s very clear that the district has an expectation that teachers need to give something up financially,” said Donovan. “There has to be a lot of research into how realistic such concessions are.”
Although Donovan said that both sides are open to all options, one of the main ideas on the table is district furlough days.
On these furlough days there would be no school and teachers would not be paid. The money saved from teachers’ salaries would be used to help lessen the reductions and personnel cuts for the next two school years.
“The governor has given school districts the ability to shorten the school year by up to seven and a half days if they so choose,” said Koehne.
Koehne added that if approved, furlough days would likely coincide with already scheduled teacher workdays when there are no classes, ensuring that the number of school days for students will not change.
Although the cuts were unfortunate, Enoch said that the passage of Measure C along with federal stimulus funds prevented a much worse situation.
Most of the almost $9.8 million in stimulus funds will be used to balance the 2008-2009 budget. The remainder, along with the annual $6.7 million from Measure C, will be put toward helping curb the effects of state cuts for the following school years.
“Without Measure C and money from the federal government, we would probably have been in a position where we couldn’t rescind any of the cuts,” said Corti.