During a special meeting the month after the district's $75 parcel tax was defeated at the polls, the school board reluctantly approved a list of more than 30 programs to be cut in order to make up its $1.65 million deficit.
These programs were grouped into four levels according to the effect their absence would have on students in the classroom. The least vital were placed in level one and the most vital in level four. Level four programs would be reinstated first if the money was found.
|
|
The Review takes a look at several of the programs and services that may not be around next year.
SCHOOL BUS SERVICE HEADING FOR A DEAD END
The yellow school bus may become a rare sight on coastal roads.
The swinging budget ax at the school district will chop $318,974 in transportation funding.
"It doesn't look good," said bus driver Sherri Trigueiro. "I think it's time to be looking for another job."
The district's eight bus drivers were all given layoff notices recently in the face of the impending cuts.
While district officials have yet to make a final decision on how to make the cuts, come fall, bus service will probably be eliminated for all but Cunha Intermediate School and special education students.
"It will be scaled back dramatically," said district Superintendent John Bayless. "Transportation is going to be different than it is today."
Trigueiro, who has been driving a bus for eight years and has bused many children since they were in kindergarten, worries how students will get to and from school without bus service. Some of the students she picks up can't fall back on a ride from their parents because they don't have cars or are at work.
"If I'm not there to get them they're not going to school that day," she said.
She fears that some students will walk to school, a dangerous trip along Highway 1. She also predicted already sluggish morning traffic will get worse as parents take their children to school.
Most families are charged about 75 cents per student per day for bus service. Legally, the district could increase that to $6.04 but Bayless doubted that the community would support it.
Across the state, penny-pinched school districts have had to cut transportation from their budgets.
Pacifica's Laguna Salada Union Elementary School District eliminated school bus service 10 years ago because of budget crises. Jim Lianides, the district's director of business services, said districts with school bus service are becoming an anomaly in the state and the Cabrillo school district is one of the holdouts.
"It's probably one of the last lingering programs around," he said.
COUNSELING CUTS WORRY EDUCATORS
Two out of the five counselor positions in the school district are on the chopping block due to the district's budget crisis.
However, if additional money is raised, the middle school counselor position will be retained, followed by the Half Moon Bay High School counselor position.
The picture Cunha Principal Randy Chapin paints of the impending halving of counseling staff at his school is not pretty.
"In a sense it would be ridiculous," Chapin said. "They're going a mile a minute now with two full-time people."
Some of the counselors' duties include meeting with parents and students, monitoring students with poor grades, making phone calls home, helping kids straighten out their schedules, and dealing with the day-to-day emotions of middle school kids, Chapin said.
Cunha counselor Katharine Weber sees 450 students, nearly 50 of them special-needs students.
"Picture only having one to oversee double that," she said. "It would be an impossible job, I'm afraid."
Weber said when she tells people in other parts of the country that counseling positions could be cut, they are shocked.
"Look at what's happening on middle school campuses across the country," she said. "There is a lot of concern about kids feeling disenfranchised and about violence in schools. Most schools are adding counselors."
These concerns may be compounded by the fact that school security is also on the list of programs to be cut.
The role of counselors at the school is crucial, said language arts teacher Jeff Messer.
"A lot of people don't realize that there is a lot of emotional stress on kids in middle school," he said. "Counselors are not just putting kids in classes and moving them out. A lot of kids at this age get distraught and counselors help them out in ways that don't get seen."
At the high school the three counselors meet with every 10th-grader to do a long-range academic plan. With only two, that would not be possible, said counselor Ken Church. The peer helping class would be dropped as well and teachers, rather than counselors, would have to do course registration.
Church thinks the school will continue to function, but kids will suffer.
"Every minute we spend doing support administration is time away from kids," he said.
Math teacher Chris Coulter thinks a lot of people don't understand everything counselors do. When he first came to the school there were two counselors and the difference now with three is notable, he said.
"They really make sure kids are getting their stuff together to go to college. With only two, it's much more likely we'll see kids slipping through the cracks."
Student reaction to the cuts was mixed.
Michelle Jones, a ninth-grader, said she would rather lose a counselor than advanced placement classes or some of the other programs at the school.
But junior Leilani Ortiz agrees it would be very hard for two counselors to schedule all the students.
"They're a big part of our school, because they are like a guide for us," Ortiz said. "They tell us what class to take and what requirements we need for college. It's a main piece of our future."
TEACHERS, OFFICIALS LAMENT CLASS-SIZE INCREASE AT HIGH SCHOOL
A group of local volunteers have helped preserve the small-class-size program at the kindergarten level but the high school will not be so lucky.
Because of the severe budget crisis, the district must cut $88,700 from popular class-size reduction programs in kindergarten and freshman classes.
The district decided to eliminate $71,000 from the kindergarten program, but community volunteers with Operation Band-Aid staved off that move by raising enough money to save it.
"I feel very comfortable saying the kindergarten (program) will be funded," said Bayless.
At the high school, $17,700 will be cut from the program. The class-size reduction program applied to English, math and social studies classes. But because of a shortage of math and science teachers, the school has never been able to reduce class size in those two subjects.
With the loss of funds, English class-size reduction will probably end too, Bayless said.
Freshman English classes had been kept to 20 students for the past 10 years thanks to a state program but now could increase to as many as 35 students, said David Wallace, co-chair of the high school's English department.
Wallace said freshmen benefited from the smaller class size. Incoming students often need extra attention as they make the transition from middle school to high school, he said.
In a class of 30 or more, it's easier for students to be distracted and harder for teachers to assign intensive writing assignments because of the volume of work involved for instructors. Smaller class size makes it easier to meet with students' parents as well, he said.
"It's much easier to do when you have only 20 students, not 35," he said.
ART, MUSIC MAY BE UNDERMINED BY BUDGET SHORTFALL
With basics like literacy programs, counseling, custodians and library tech positions being cut due to the budget shortfall, the outlook for so-called "extras" such as art and music are in question at the district's three elementary schools.
While the district funds these programs at the high school and intermediate school levels, it has never paid for them at its elementary schools, said Bayless. That duty has always fallen on parents of students attending Hatch, Farallone View and El Granada elementary schools.
Now with parent groups focusing the bulk of their efforts on raising money to offset the drastic effects of proposed cuts to other programs, Bayless said that art and music programs at these schools could be in jeopardy.
Mike Bachicha, principal of the Farallone View school in Montara, hopes that the school will keep its art and music programs. But he also worries that parent groups may be taxed by dipping into their pockets to save other programs.
"How much can you ask your parents for?" he said.
Currently, Farallone View students make a trip once every two weeks to do sculpture, watercolors and painting with Susan Carkeek of the Fly on the Wall studio in Moss Beach. For music class, kindergartners through third-graders go to a percussion and rhythm class on Fridays.
Bachicha is hopeful that the school will keep these programs.
"They (the parents) value music and art and there's still a chance we can pull it off," he said.
Losing the programs would be a real loss for the kids, Bachicha said.
"It's an avenue for a different type of expression and different intelligences and different parts of the brain are being accessed," he said.
"As far as would there be art for people to hang on the refrigerator? Yeah, but it wouldn't be the same."
At El Granada, students have a music class where they play instruments, sing and dance and an art consultant who goes into third- through fifth-grade classes and works on special projects with the students.
Principal Michael Andrews said the kids love the programs.
"Art and music is huge in the sense of development," he said. "They're an integral part of our program that the faculty and the community are concerned about losing."
Cunha Intermediate School Principal Chapin agrees that studying art and music has a positive effect on kids. He stressed that the district hasn't talked about cutting these classes at the intermediate school.
The discipline of practicing
an instrument can lead to kids working harder in other areas, he said.
"They're an enrichment, but they're essential," he said. "I cringe at schools and societies that have lost art because there is so much expression in art."
MONEY STILL NEEDED FOR SPORTS COACH STIPENDS
When the word got out that high school coach stipends, a payment for coaching high school sports, was on the chopping block, money poured in to fill the void.
As of Tuesday, high school Athletic Director Neil McNevin had raised enough money from donations to pay for about two dozen stipends, leaving five still not funded.
If nothing changes, Principal Barbara Stanley will choose which five coaching stipends will not be paid, according to McNevin.
The average coaches' stipend is about $3,000.
The reduction in the stipends is the latest financial headache that McNevin must deal with.
Not only has the budget not increased over the past 10 years, it decreased by a third this past year. Meanwhile, more sports are being offered.
The girls' soccer program was formed in the early 1990s. Swimming returned to Half Moon Bay after a near 20-year hiatus in 1999. This fall, Half Moon Bay will add water polo to the list of sports offered. Both water polo and swimming do not rely on district money. The funding for those programs has been raised privately.
If enough money is not raised to pay all the stipends, one possibility is that the sports in which the stipends are not paid could be dropped, although McNevin said he doesn't foresee that happening.
"The folks here will not allow sports to be dropped," McNevin predicted.
The average stipend is between 25 cents and $2 an hour, once the time and expenses the coaches spend are factored in.
"I would rather take the quarter than nothing at all," said Kenny Milch, Half Moon Bay's boys' basketball coach. "We don't make much as it is."
McNevin said that Stanley will work out the department budget by the start of the school year in the fall.
w